Xbox Was Worse Than We Thought - WAN Show July 10, 2026

Summary

WAN Show Podcast Summary: "Xbox Was Worse Than We Thought" – July 10, 2026

Podcast: The WAN Show
Hosts: Linus Sebastian, Luke Lafreniere (plus Dan)
Episode Date: July 11, 2026
Main Theme:
A deep dive into the dramatic Xbox corporate restructuring, its industry fallout, and wide-ranging tech and gaming news—including Steam’s refund policy, GOG’s DRM stance, Discord’s ban controversy, and more.

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Episode Overview

This week, Linus and Luke focus on the seismic layoffs and restructuring at Xbox/Microsoft, examining not just the numbers, but also the industry practices and employee impact. The show also touches on tech infrastructure, the ongoing challenges facing indie game developers (especially around Steam’s refund policy), ownership in the digital era, and a mix of gaming nostalgia and modern trends.

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Key Topics & Timestamps

1. Xbox’s Massive Restructuring and Layoffs ([03:32]–[47:48])

Summary:

• Xbox is undergoing a "giant reset," cutting 20% of its workforce, with 3,200 roles eliminated.
• Five studios have been offloaded. Compulsion Games and Double Fine transition to independence with their IP catalog; Undead Labs and Ninja Theory to be sold; Arkane Lyon is "exploring other options."
• Idol Software cut by ~50% (down to the Doom 2016 team size); Obsidian lost 25+% (60-70 people); Avowed 2 canceled for now.
• The restructure aims to focus on key IPs: Halo, Minecraft, Elder Scrolls. The team reportedly grew 40% during the pandemic.
• Indie partners like IO Interactive (Hitman, 007) lost funding as well, triggering layoffs beyond Microsoft.

Quotes:

• “Xbox apparently grew their business too fast during COVID… up to 14 layers of management for decisions. Now they're cutting back as margins are three to ten times lower than the competition.” (Linus, [04:20])
• "I love starting the show on a controversial note." (Linus, [07:10])

Memorable Segment:

• Linus questions the practice of massive hiring/layoffs vs. staying small and ultra-profitable—comparing Microsoft’s overreach to Valve’s under-hiring model ([08:55]).

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2. Ownership, Studio Survival, and Gaming Nostalgia ([12:13]–[47:40])

Summary:

• Discussion about whether being acquired is saving or dooming studios.
• Live service model vs. traditional "feast or famine" dev cycles.
• The emotional impact of layoffs on identity and self-worth.
• Whether Microsoft could have managed growth more sustainably.
• Nostalgic storytelling of how Halo was a formative touchstone.
• Debate on how (or if) Halo could be revived as a system seller; the need for a creative "reset" ([13:51]–[19:09]).

Quotes:

• "Can I ask a question… Is it better to expand like crazy and hire a bunch of people and have layoffs, or just never hire anybody and be obscenely profitable?" (Linus, [08:55])
• "If they release one good Halo, we're back, baby. One good Halo game, everybody will come back. It would happen." (Luke, [45:46])

Memorable Segment:

• Linus and Luke recount the Christmas Halo story; Luke’s dad “scamming” him with an Xbox as a surprise gift ([14:17]).

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3. Who Could (or Would) Buy Xbox? ([28:00]–[39:00])

Summary:

• Linus ponders if Xbox will exist in 10 years and who could buy the brand if Microsoft exits.
• Amazon seen as a likely contender due to continued Luna streaming push, but other options: Nvidia, AMD, maybe even Intel.
• Discuss the technical and business requirements for such an acquisition (hardware, streaming infrastructure, developer relations).
• Sony? Likely not in position or mood.

Quotes:

• “The only companies I could see… would be probably AMD and Nvidia. Or… I guess Intel.” (Linus, [32:24])

Memorable Segment:

• Discussion on whether a hypothetical Nvidia console (“RTXBox”) would prioritize cloud streaming and ARM CPUs ([32:22], [38:19]).

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4. Game Engines and the Death of IdTech ([39:00]–[47:48])

Summary:

• Lament the downsizing of idSoftware; concern that the idTech engine may be functionally dead.
• Both hosts express fatigue with the ubiquity of Unreal Engine.
• IDTech’s legacy, performance, and importance for game diversity discussed.

Quote:

• "In a world where gamers hate poorly optimized games… man, does the end result ever look and feel good to play. As a gamer, I love that." (Linus, [24:01])

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5. Steam Refund Policy vs. Indie Devs ([81:34]–[89:47])

Summary:

• “Paddle Paddle Paddle” developer reports a 21% refund rate, largely due to Steam's 2-hour refund window on a ~3–4 hour game.
• Many players complete the game in under 2 hours, then refund, despite generally positive reviews.
• Steam’s uniform refund policy may unintentionally punish well-made short games—dev suggests displaying average completion time.
• Broader debate about value perception, game length, and fairness.

Quote:

• "Defining the value of a game by how long it is… is like defining the value of code by how many lines it is." (Linus, [87:40])

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6. Digital Ownership and GOG’s Stand ([108:32]–[114:34])

Summary:

• Joint CEO of GOG reiterates that the future of gaming shouldn’t mean sacrificing ownership—GOG games are DRM-free and stay accessible even if they leave the store.
• Sony’s move to a disc-free PlayStation by 2028 sparks concern about consumer rights and used game markets.
• Linus and Luke shop for favorite games on GOG’s sale, praise real ownership.

Quote:

• "Players should have the full confidence that the games they buy will remain accessible regardless of changes to platform, storefronts or business models." (GOG CEO quoted by Luke, [108:34])

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7. Discord’s Major Ban Controversy ([104:25]–[107:26])

Summary:

• Discord’s automated system mistakenly bans thousands for posting “harmful” images, including benign chessboard and Minecraft screenshots due to a flawed hash in their content database.
• Second bug kept bans from being reversed.
• Debate on how automation without human review can have damaging real-life consequences; privacy and due process matters.

Quote:

• "There's no excuse either for banning people's accounts and labeling them child predators when… they didn’t do anything." (Linus, [106:13])

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8. Website and UI Bloat; Shopping Extensions ([166:19]–[170:44])

Summary:

• Highlight the annoyance of modern e-commerce sites riddled with low-quality knockoff brands and intrusive ads.
• Testing of a Chrome extension (“Knockoff”) designed to filter junk brands from Amazon.
• Nostalgia for the unique, playful UI designs of past decades versus the cookie-cutter templates of today's web.
• Reflection on how ad-blocking and browser privacy tools interact with user experience.

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9. Game Length, Playlists, and Binging vs. Episodic Content ([159:03]–[162:26])

Summary:

• Netflix’s issue: massive audience drop-off after one season—hosts discuss how binge-watching, lack of content resolution, and long waits for follow-ups factor in.
• Similar trend on YouTube: episodic series and playlists see drastically lower engagement than one-offs.

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10. Steam Library Sorting: The Hidden ‘Date Added’ Option ([122:01]–[126:46])

Summary:

• Linus and Luke discover that sorting your Steam library by "date added" is possible, but buried and unintuitive.
• Rant about modern software usually hiding the most useful features beneath bad UI choices.

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11. EU-Mandated Driver Monitoring and Privacy ([173:33]–[176:57])

Summary:

• EU now requires all new cars to include a driver distraction warning system—a camera watching your gaze. While rules say processing must be local and private, actual enforcement is questionable.
• Anecdotes of driver assist systems being more dangerous than useful in certain situations.

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12. Miscellaneous Technology News ([182:25]–[184:50])

• Chinese NAND is now in Lenovo laptops; Apple may start using CXMT memory for China devices.
• China bans AI “companionbots.”
• Nvidia launching collectible GPU trading cards.
• GOG and more: game ownership, nostalgia, best old games.

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13. Chat Q&A, Off-Topic Fun, & Community Segments ([186:43]–end)

Highlights:

• Audience questions on esport careers for kids, succession of Steam libraries, favorite merch, cool tech collectibles, and more.
• Hilarious "epic flying mount" CraigsList story, offers to buy Luke’s Steam account, and debates about in-game and digital inheritance.

Quote:

• "Would you take $1,000 to put some random from floatplane in your will to have your Steam account?" (Linus, [157:39])

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Notable Quotes and Moments

• "Layoffs bad across the board." (Linus, [08:55])
• "No one that worked on that [Halo] show… ever played the game… It's so ridiculous." (Luke, [20:53])
• "There's a lot of developers out there who could use a project to work on." (Linus, [23:31])
• "Steam's uniform refund policy may unintentionally punish well-made short games." ([83:41])
• "Defining the value of a code by how many lines…" ([87:40])
• "Netflix's biggest hits are losing more than half their audience after one season." (Linus, [159:03])
• "I can't tell the difference between… a very cutting edge bot versus a very not as cutting edge human brain." (Linus, [138:53])

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Tone and Style

The overall tone is conversational, humorous, often self-deprecating, but always grounded in a mix of business savvy and tech/gamer culture references. There’s nostalgia, open questioning, and a willingness to critique both industry giants and indie devs. The hosts are honest about what they don’t know and invite input from the live audience and each other.

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Recommended Segments by Interest

• Inside the Xbox Layoff Crisis: [03:32]–[13:49]
• Philosophy of Big Tech Layoffs/Valve vs. Microsoft: [07:28]–[13:49]
• Saving vs. Damning Game Studios: [12:19]–[13:49]
• Epic Flying Mount Craigslist saga (funny): [144:13]–[146:39]
• Steam Indie Refunds Problem: [81:34]–[89:47]
• Digital Ownership & GOG Shopping: [108:32]–[114:34]
• Web Bloat/Shopping Extension: [166:19]–[170:44]

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TL;DR

This WAN Show delivers a dense, candid exploration of the current state of gaming industry layoffs with a focus on Xbox/Microsoft, and zooms out to broader questions of technology, digital ownership, consumer rights, and community. There’s irreverence and humor throughout, but always a clear-eyed look at how big tech decisions ripple through developers, players, and the entire tech ecosystem.

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Want more?
Jump to [03:32] for the start of the Xbox segment, [81:34] for Steam refund woes, or [166:19] for the modern web rant and shopping extension demo.

Transcript

[Luke]

This episode is brought to you by Starbucks.

[Linus]

That is fire.

[Luke]

Whoa, that's good.

[Linus]

This might be the drink of the summer.

[Luke]

Okay, I like this one too. I'm rocking with it. Okay, try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home.

[Dan]

Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours.

[Linus]

What's up, everyone, and welcome to the WAN show. We have a great show lined up for you guys today. The big news this week is, of course, the massive restructuring going on at Xbox. And it was rumored and now it has happened. And I gotta admit, I'm probably gonna get myself into trouble with this topic because I've got a bit of a controversial take on it. In other news. Oh, man, Steam might need to do something about their refund policy. And I mean, oh man, I'm gonna get myself in trouble with this one too. Maybe make it worse. Because the way that it is right now, it's is harming indie devs in a way that I got to admit, I didn't see coming. What else we got going on this week?

[Luke]

Well, the most important news of the week above the Microsoft stuff is that Hannah Montana Linux has a modern remaster nearly two decades later.

[Linus]

Really? You went with that?

[Luke]

So we can use that now.

[Linus]

Classic link.

[Luke]

Good. That's very good. Classic also. I don't know, man. Why not? This GoG joint CEO says that the future of gaming shouldn't come at the expense of ownership.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's pretty cool.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

The show is brought to you today by Squarespace, MSI, Toshiba and Motion Gray, alongside our rap partner, dBrand, our laptop partner, Razer, And our chair partner, Razer. All right, before we jump into the Microsoft topic, we should probably explain what's going on here. Times are tough. Times are tough. And bandwidth.

[Luke]

But it's been hard.

[Linus]

And compute especially, are getting. Are getting expensive. So Luke had the brilliant idea.

[Dan]

Was it you?

[Luke]

I don't know.

[Linus]

Someone. Someone on set. Let's blame Dan. Had the brilliant idea of saving some bandwidth on streaming on Floatplane for the WAN show.

[Luke]

I think it was you and Dan

[Linus]

by reducing the amount of movement in the frame. So Dan came up with the innovative idea of shooting. Oh, no, I think the plate was me creating a plate.

[Luke]

Pretty sure the plate was you. I think Dan brought up the idea of just like, reducing.

[Linus]

Right, right.

[Luke]

Not moving. We saved money.

[Linus]

Yeah. So we shot a plate of the set and then Luke and I just have our heads poking up through it. So I don't know if we're going to do this the whole time. But we could, we could. Can you, can you look at the stats and see how much less bandwidth we use? Like this? Do you think it's significant?

[Luke]

I can't right now.

[Linus]

Okay. Someone's gonna have to look at it.

[Luke]

Someone might be able to at some point.

[Linus]

What unique username says it was in fact Dan. Nice. Solid. Anyhow, why don't we jump right into our first topic of the day. Xbox has hit a giant reset button, plans a massive corporate restructure, cutting 20% of the workforce and offloading five, yes, five studios. They've announced 3200 roll eliminations. So 1600 when it was announced. 1600 by end of year, on top of the 16 of 1600 others across Microsoft's workforce. And the aim here is shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects in the case of Xbox, like Halo, Minecraft and the Elder Scrolls. In an open letter written by Asha Sharma. Xbox apparently grew their business too fast during COVID making teams 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation. In such cases, with up to 14 layers of management for decisions. Now they're cutting back as margins are three to 10 times lower than the competition. And Big green has lost 64 cents for every dollar they invested. Instead of just shutting down five studios, Xbox has allowed Compulsion Games and Double Fine to transition to independent studios with their IP catalog and Runway for their

[Luke]

next games, which is actually kind of cool.

[Linus]

Which is actually pretty cool. Undead Labs and Ninja Theory will be sold to undisclosed buyers and their games, state of decay 3 and Senua will still be released. Senua? I'm actually not sure. Arcane lion, maker of Dishonored, Deathloop and upcoming Blade game, is in the initial phases of quote unquote, exploring other options. But this wasn't the end. Later this week, id Software lost about half of its workforce, approximately 90 people, and has been reduced to the size of the team that released doom 2016. Meanwhile, obsidian lost about 25%. So this is 60 to 70 people. And avowed to has been canceled. Although a small team will continue to work on the game in hopes of it getting un cancelled while they wait for a new Fallout project.

[Luke]

I'm concerned about that. That feels like that group is maybe in the second part of this layoff. That's how I read that. Hopefully not.

[Linus]

Let's hope not.

[Luke]

Another thing I wanted to note is that Microsoft had investments in projects going on that were not just in Microsoft Studios. So like IO Interactive is one of those. But the Hitman developer who also just released a very good 007 game.

[Linus]

I heard their adaptive controller, their accessibility team got absolutely brutalized as part of this which really sucks because that's something

[Luke]

that those are industry leading and people use them for things outside of just Xbox. That's really unfortunate. But yeah. So IO Interactive is fine to be clear. But I think they were working on an RPG or a fantasy type game which would be a little bit different for them. And a lot of the funding for that somehow some reason not sure, maybe it's supposed to be on game Pass, I don't know. Was through Microsoft and that funding is gone. So IO has had to respond with effectively layoffs of their own. Apparently the project isn't canceled but I think a studio is closed and there were some other miscellaneous layoffs.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Rough.

[Linus]

We've got a quite a few discussion questions. I am going to jump in with one that I think is, is going to be maybe a little bit controversial. I love starting the show on a controversial note.

[Dan]

Where. Where is it?

[Linus]

I wanted to. Okay, I'm just gonna. I had kind of written, I had written it down but I can't, I can't find where I wrote it. So I'm. Let me, let me pose this to you. I think that we can all agree that layoffs are bad. I don't think they're. I don't think there's a. I don't think there's a winner. I don't think consumers win. I don't think they're, they're getting, you know, more or better products necessarily out of a layoff. I don't think the employees win. You know, not having your job definitely throws your whole life into uncertainty. Like our, our, our man. It's amazing as adults how much of like I don't know about. I don't, not. Maybe not everyone. But you know, for me my job is a huge part of my identity and my value.

[Luke]

Basically the first question after people meet you is what do you do?

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah. And that's that really is it.

[Dan]

That's it.

[Luke]

When you're in high school, when you're in elementary school, it's like what's your favorite color?

[Linus]

Yeah. High school, it's like what are you studying? Or that's more, maybe more university is

[Luke]

what are you studying?

[Linus]

What are you studying?

[Luke]

Post university, what do you do?

[Linus]

What do you do? And they don't mean tiddlywinks tournaments on the weekend.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And meanwhile, I don't think, I don't

[Luke]

think it's a winx. Tournaments on the weekend are sick though.

[Linus]

I don't think it's a win for, for Microsoft either. I don't think, I don't think Microsoft wants to be in a position where they're, where they're terminating jobs.

[Luke]

No, they wanted to be in a position where they had 100 million game pass subscriptions and they thought this was the path there. This wasn't what they wanted.

[Linus]

And so, so we can all agree layoffs bad across the board. Can I ask a question though? And if the answer is, if the answer is, you know, that's a stupid question, I'm totally, I'm open to that answer, but I want to ask a question here. Is it better to expand like crazy and hire a bunch of people and try and do all this stuff and have layoffs, or is it better to just never hire anybody in the first place and just be obscenely profitable? It occurred to me, just because it came up for like the fourth time in the last few months, that Valve's a really small company. Yeah, but are they though? Are they. Valve chooses to have several hundred employees while being one of, if not the most profitable companies per headcount. And the reason this came up this week was because I was, I was talking about sort of like how they just keep acting like such a tiny little company, like Steam controllers are backordered until mid next year or something like that. Don't, don't quote me on the exact date. And, and I'm sure they're hoping to, you know, hit it at an accelerated schedule and all that and they may over deliver. To be clear, I'm not like, I don't want to trash on Valve here, but also, you know, we give a really hard time to companies who overhire and lay people off. And I feel like Valve gets a free pass for just being like, by

[Luke]

not having created the jobs in the

[Linus]

first place by the yacht manufacturer wealthy and just never hiring anybody and then going, oh, oh, woe is me. I simply cannot do a longer press briefing for the most important product of the year because we're a really small, you have to understand, we're a really small company. And so I'm just wondering why. There seems to be a double standard here. To be clear, Microsoft created this situation. They wrote the story where they're the villain of the story.

[Luke]

They also bought out other studios in order to do that.

[Linus]

They didn't have to do that.

[Luke]

So they gobbled up all the jobs and then deleted them, which is worse,

[Linus]

unless we don't know what situation those companies that were gobbled up were in like, I remember talking back when, back when I toured Monolith, right. They, they talked about the difficulty of being an independent studio. How you basically just, you starve while you develop what is hopefully a home run hit. And then, and then you eat. And realistically you lay off a bunch of people at launch anyway because you don't need QA when you're sitting at the like, conceptualizing stage of your next title and then you like, ramp up, ramp, ramp, ramp up again and then you're starving and then you, oh, hopefully hit a home run again. Like, it's also very challenging. Like live service games came around because the, the feast or famine nature of the games industry is really, really challenging.

[Luke]

It is interesting that you mentioned Monolith because aren't they gone?

[Linus]

They are gone, but would they have been gone anyway?

[Luke]

I don't know.

[Linus]

That's an interesting question, one that we unfortunately have no magic time travel crystal ball to ask.

[Luke]

Even if you did, I don't think you could because I think they changed hands. I think they went to Warner Brothers or something. So, like they started independent. You wouldn't know what happened if they kept going down that line. You, you wouldn't know what they happened if they stayed with Microsoft. Although you can probably guess. Yeah, it's rough because, I mean, it's not Minecraft, Elder Scrolls or Halo.

[Linus]

Yeah. Monolith was owned by Warner Brothers from 2004 until it shut down in 2025.

[Luke]

You know what's interesting? Shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects. And then outside of the quotes, it says Halo, Minecraft and Elder Scrolls. Did they say that or did we say that?

[Linus]

That is something that they've talked about, but it might not have been as part of that quote.

[Luke]

It's interesting to me that they didn't mention anything from, from Blizzard, Activision.

[Linus]

Okay, I, I wouldn't read too much into that yet.

[Luke]

Oh, I didn't mean as like a studio closure type thing. It's just interesting that like, in their perspectives, those are their, I want to say Halo projects, but Halo's in the thing, so it gets complicated. But you know what I mean, right? Interesting, interesting, interesting, interesting. Halo still being something that they glom onto is interesting because Halo is such a strong part of Microsoft's gaming identity. But Halo's also been just dead for so long.

[Linus]

Really long time.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

What would it take to resurrect Halo for you at this point?

[Luke]

Oh, that's tough because so context there is. I was a huge Halo fan, basically.

[Linus]

Halo raised him.

[Luke]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus]

Well, no, but, like, if you ask, I guarantee that involvement. I know the answer. If you ask Luke, what's his, like, biggest childhood memory? Most like. So you know where I'm going.

[Luke]

I know the one that you're referencing.

[Linus]

Christmas morning, his dad scammed him. Just completely bamboozled him.

[Luke]

Could never trust that man.

[Linus]

Yeah. Into thinking that he had gotten, like. It was, like, clothes or something.

[Luke]

No, I tricked us. That the big box in the corner.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Had a crystal ball under it. That was for my mom, right?

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke]

But actually keep my mom from getting us to open it because it was for her, and he wanted it to be the big reveal at the end for her. No one else knew that he said this to us. So Rich and I kept. Rich is my brother kept getting our family to not let us open this box, and nobody knew why.

[Linus]

And then at the end, under the box was an Xbox.

[Luke]

We lift it without looking at it to show my mom. We're looking at my mom for her reaction, and she's looking at us all confused. And then we look under the box, and there's an Xbox and Halo and. And I think there was another game, but who cares? There was Halo.

[Linus]

There was Halo.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

What an absolute legend move.

[Luke]

That was huge.

[Linus]

We do have. Right. So, yeah. What would it take? What would it take to make you excited about Halo again? Because I guarantee you it won't be making it an Xbox exclusive. And Microsoft seems to be back to, like, oh, yeah, Xbox exclusives are important. Like, would you buy an Xbox to play Halo? I doubt it. 2026.

[Luke]

Not current ones. Honestly, I think there's a lot that they could do. Halo Infinite multiplayer is actually pretty good. I had fun, but it doesn't feel completely there.

[Linus]

That's.

[Luke]

That's fair, in my opinion.

[Linus]

That's totally fair.

[Luke]

I also think that the single player, like, they actually had a pretty interesting idea.

[Linus]

I was really excited to play it together, and then Luke played, like, a little bit of it, and he was like, yeah, it's lame. Don't bother.

[Luke]

We can still play it together if you want. I mean, ever play video games?

[Linus]

Campaign Evolved is coming out.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus]

Yeah, we could do that instead.

[Dan]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Luke]

A recreation of the first one. We're probably gonna talk about that later in the show, too, because Assassin's Creed, Black Flag came out yesterday.

[Linus]

Have you played it already? Is it good?

[Luke]

I have thoughts. It's gonna be a longer conversation, though.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus]

We'll get to that later.

[Luke]

But, yeah, I don't know. I think going back to Roots a little Bit. I don't like what they've done with Cortana. I don't. I. I think similarly to a few different franchises, they need kind of a reset.

[Linus]

Okay. So they're weighed down by just like a convoluted, stupid canon that was written by people who honestly didn't understand. What made Halo great is, like, I

[Luke]

read some of the books because I'm a nerd. So I think you could go back. Go into Master Chief's.

[Linus]

Is there, like, a time travel mechanism in. In the Halo universe?

[Luke]

No, but just do a prequel. Halo 1 prequel.

[Linus]

You have to do a prequel. You have to do a prequel. Right, though, like, I. I actually think

[Luke]

the game could be very different because it could be. It was like, John during the. John. Halo during. During the Spartan training program.

[Linus]

Sure.

[Luke]

Or something like that.

[Linus]

It's got to be Reach.

[Luke]

Reaches in the past. I stopped paying attention after three.

[Linus]

It's tough because, like, when your prequel, you have to, like, your next game has to be, like, bigger and better and more exciting and have new mechanics. Right. But a prequel can't break the rules of the timeline, of the. Of the universe. So, like, even be. So it was 1999, okay. I was only 13 when the Phantom Menace came out. And when R2D2 fires up his rocket boosters, I'm like, I wanted to walk out of the theater. I was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. If he had rocket thrusters, why didn't he use them later? And. And the whole, like, canon thing where R2D2 has sentience because he's, like, never been wiped or whatever. So what? He forgot. He forgot he had rocket thrusters. Like, it's just so. So whatever they do in the past, they have to fight the urge.

[Luke]

I will also point out people are saying Reach was in the past. People really liked Reach. I didn't play Reach until years afterwards because I think that's when I, like, first started going to university or something. I didn't have time, and I was away from my Xbox because I was at school. But people really liked Reaching. Reach was a very positively received game. So I think they could do something like Reach again. But I would get off. I would get off the current timeline. Dear God. I would try to get off the current timeline or, like, find some way. And it's. This is the problem.

[Linus]

Just comic book it. Why not just reset something like that? Like, honestly, I think.

[Luke]

I think.

[Linus]

I think Disney should do that with Star wars too.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Just reset. It started over because it's it's gotten so convoluted. There's so many, like, there's so many things that started out as a pitch for how to sell a toy that just make no sense in the canon anymore. But then, I mean, I don't. Meanwhile, they try and do a reboot with Harry Potter and everyone's like, oh, it's stupid, man.

[Luke]

And they did the. They. That completely derailed me, and I don't know why. What's going on with my brain today? Oh, right. They did the TV show and it was just so stupid. Like, oh, my.

[Linus]

Okay, okay, here's a question.

[Dan]

Here's a question.

[Linus]

Oh, man. We're gonna trigger him so hard. He's already probably got an upset headache. What do you hate more? The Warcraft movie. You knew where I was going with this. Or Halo TV show.

[Luke]

Honestly, I think the Halo TV show, really. I think so. And the Warcraft movie pissed me off.

[Linus]

But the Warcraft movie is so offensive. Just because Blizzard was so, so good at cinematics and storytelling.

[Luke]

They did it live action for some reason. Oh, man. They had. They had cinematics so down that I bet. I bet you can still find it. There's like. I bet you on YouTube, there's a, like, Warcraft 3 all cinematics.

[Dan]

I'm fixing it right now. There we go. Yeah, yeah, I got you.

[Luke]

Warcraft 3, all cinematics in chronological order, 2.1 million views. Warcraft 3, all cinematics. HHS high quality, remastered, 5.6 million views. Warcraft 3 cutscenes and cinematics pre. Wow. 2.3 million views. Oh, my God, man. When you can get that many views on just the cinematics from your game. Wow.

[Linus]

Yeah. And then we can lose the plate. I think it's. I think the joke's over.

[Luke]

And then they. And then they changed the story and they did it live action, which is just so insane. But the Halo one is so much worse. Okay, his helmet's off just like all the time. Like, nothing matters. No one that worked on that show, as far as I can tell, ever played the game, ever cared anything about the lore. Just nothing makes any sense. It's so. It's so ridiculous. And then. And then you have, like, the. The. The Waste of Cortana, which is. Which is frustrating on multiple platforms, I'm going to say. Not even levels, because then they brought it way too early to, like, the Windows Assistant thing. Whereas if Copilot now was Cortana, I actually bet you it would have been received better.

[Linus]

Yeah, well, people were pretty open to the branding of Cortana when they first introduced and then she ended up.

[Luke]

It was just garbage.

[Linus]

So useless.

[Luke]

And Copilot's garbage. But it's less garbage than Cortana.

[Linus]

And I can see a trajectory where Copilot could kind of do Cortana y things.

[Luke]

Yeah, eventually. Yeah, for sure. The original Cortana was just never going to go anywhere.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

So it's like they have just burned Cortana, which is going to burn any Halo player that like projects themselves to try to be Mr. John.

[Linus]

Okay, so basically what I'm hearing is a miracle. Christmas miracle is what it would take for Luke to re engage with the Halo universe.

[Luke]

Basically set off some ring accidentally and instead of blowing up or like biological deleting or whatever those rings do. I don't fully remember actually. Never actually really cared. It doesn't really matter to be honest. Whatever the giant ring MacGuffin is, have one of them go off unexpectedly and it like time warps you or something and they'd just be like, whatever. Just forget about it. Nothing else ever happened after we released Reach. Just ignore everything.

[Linus]

It was all a dream. Full reset.

[Luke]

I remember. I think I've told this story on wan before, but I had to review the original Xbox Elite controller for a video.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And I wasn't really sure what to do and I came up with like, you know what, I'm just going to go to Willow and rent Halo 5 and put it up in the. The. The room up there. And after work one day I just stayed back and ordered some pizza.

[Linus]

Played Halo 5, heated the pizza with

[Luke]

PC, played the play, played the campaign and I remember finishing the whole thing and just being like gross. Good controller. But yeah, ick, I don't like that.

[Linus]

I mean just hey, if they wanted to start over on Halo, there's a lot of. A lot of developers out there who could use a project to work on.

[Luke]

Yeah. Speaking of you know, the really weird engine, as far as I can tell that they're running. Maybe they should have used ID tech.

[Linus]

Oh dude.

[Luke]

Considering Wolfenstein feels great.

[Linus]

Indiana Jones.

[Luke]

Indiana Jones.

[Linus]

So freaking incredible. Amazing.

[Luke]

It doom like oh my God, what a well running and good looking game.

[Linus]

Like I.

[Luke]

It's like you know my favorite engine out there, dude.

[Linus]

In a world where there's so much yes. Rage. In a world in a world where gamers hate poorly optimized games.

[Luke]

Yeah. It tech has been dude.

[Linus]

And look, I'll be the first to admit that I know nothing about, you know, choosing an engine to develop my game. Wouldn't know the first thing about that, maybe ID Tech absolutely sucks hairy donkey sack to work with. I don't know that. But what I do know is man, does the end result ever look and feel good to play. And so as a, as a gamer that I love that.

[Luke]

And I'm a little tired every single game I play being unreal.

[Linus]

We didn't have the con, we didn't give them the context yet. So the ID Tech team seems to be literally completely gone. No, like one person or something.

[Luke]

I think it was cut in half.

[Linus]

In half. Okay, that's not as bad as I

[Luke]

thought because there was a ton of people saying the whole team was gone. So you did get that from people talking online. You didn't just make that up. But I think it's not correct.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

Okay. The note that we have in the doc is instead of shutting down 5 Studios IP catalog, but this wasn't the end. Later last week, id Software lost about half its workforce, 90 people and has been reduced to the size of the team that released Doom 2016. That's, that's what I've heard.

[Linus]

Okay,

[Luke]

well now people are saying they reduced down to 57 people, which would not be half of its workforce. I don't know what's going on, but I don't know that the whole team is gone. It sounds like they were massively force reduced. Well, it's not all unreal. It's just all made on Unreal 5. Okay.

[Linus]

No, no, that's what he meant.

[Luke]

That was my point.

[Linus]

Yeah, he meant Unreal Engine, Not Unreal Tournament 2004.

[Dan]

Yeah. Thank you.

[Luke]

You're welcome. Yeah. So I, I don't know. I'm not sure. No, I mean like, I don't know exactly what's happening at id but it, but it, but it sucks because I really did like that engine. Doom 2016 like my God, what a well running game. And some people pointed out like Indiana Jones wasn't well optimized. I don't think Indiana Jones was about the optimization.

[Linus]

No. But what Indiana Jones was, was incredible looking.

[Luke]

Yes.

[Linus]

For how it did run like that. That's the, that's the thing, right guys? It's all, it's all relative to different kind of game. What the vision of the game developer was for that game. Their vision was something that looked filmic.

[Dan]

Oh wow.

[Luke]

It's weird seeing we have a TV over here. I can see myself move now. It's, it's odd.

[Linus]

And, and, and Indiana Jones looked freaking filmic. Not all the time. Right. But there were occasional moments in cutscenes when I was like, holy, did Harrison Ford get young again? Like, am I watching Indiana freaking Jones right now?

[Luke]

Which is wild.

[Dan]

Which is it?

[Linus]

Which is incredible.

[Luke]

They didn't optimize for optimization. They optimized for, yes, looking good.

[Linus]

Exactly. And that's a game developer choice. You don't have to like that choice. But not every game needs to be dota. Not every game needs to run on absolutely every piece of hardware on the planet in order to maximize how many skins they can sell. Right. Um, every. Everyone's got a different strategy. And that's. That's fine. That's acceptable.

[Luke]

Apparently digital. Someone in chat is saying Digital Foundry said Indiana Jones and Doom TDA are optimized. Indiana Jones is 100% ray traced and ran on non ray traced hardware. If you know.

[Linus]

So cool.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Anyways, that sucks because I don't know. I don't know if I'm well placing this, but I've been. I've been a little bit tired of Unreal Engine running. Basically everything.

[Linus]

Here's a new discussion question that I assume David did this. Yeah, of course it was David. He asks, will Xbox exist in 10 years? Which I don't think either of us would have any way of knowing that. But the more interesting part of this question, in my opinion, is who will own it?

[Luke]

Microsoft doesn't actually seem that interested these days.

[Linus]

If Microsoft were to sell Xbox, who would be lining up at the door to buy it? Does Amazon still have Luna?

[Luke]

Saudi Arabia?

[Linus]

I thought they've been paring back some of their like, cultural investments. When was that?

[Luke]

They bought Niantic. Niantic. Niantic, whatever.

[Linus]

Yeah, they did buy it. They did buy Niantic. That was relatively recent. Amazon. Luna still exists.

[Dan]

Wow.

[Linus]

Wow. Featuring top new games, Courtroom chaos from xbox. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

[Luke]

Get it? Amazon. And their logo has a hole in the middle of it.

[Dan]

I get it.

[Luke]

Get it. Hey, that is actually kind of the logo for Luna. It's an eight. Anyways. Whoa, that was loud.

[Linus]

That's all you get, dispatch.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke]

Oh,

[Linus]

Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I will. I'll never be free of this game.

[Luke]

I've probably spent more time in that game than like practically any

[Linus]

Skyrim Immersive adventure. Yeah, okay. Amazon is still a thing. So maybe Amazon.

[Luke]

Load that up and scroll up slightly. What was that category? What was that second last category there? What is this category? Immersive World adventure games. It's like, oh, wow. Other than Alan Wake old games. Skyrim.

[Linus]

I can't even click on this. Oh, I can go Here. Okay. No, we got Hogwarts Legacy, that's in there.

[Luke]

That is newer. But you also have Fallout 3 right beside it.

[Linus]

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Okay, yeah, well, okay. Also four. That's slightly newer.

[Luke]

Yeah, it's not that new anymore.

[Linus]

No, I said newer.

[Luke]

Like 10 years old.

[Linus]

I said newer.

[Luke]

Yeah, I also skipped. Oh, who will own it?

[Linus]

Who would buy Xbox?

[Luke]

Amazon is a. Is, I think a pretty good guess.

[Linus]

You would need to have. You'd need to have like holy sh. T. Would Nvidia buy it?

[Luke]

I don't think Nvidia is that interested in gaming right now. Okay, so G box.

[Linus]

G. Nvidia hasn't. There's no way. It wouldn't be the G spot.

[Luke]

That's what I was getting at. We had Xbox. We had a hole.

[Linus]

Yeah. Okay, now hold on, hold on a second though. In all seriousness though, there are people at Nvidia who do still care about gaming. That's the funny thing about companies, right?

[Luke]

No, absolutely.

[Linus]

They're not. Yeah, they're not. They don't actually all like march in

[Luke]

one direction and sometimes they march in very different directions.

[Linus]

There's. There's people at Nvidia who still very much care about gaming and wish that they could get more foundry time as much as any gamer does. And you know, when I brought up the possibility of, you know, yeah, could you guys just spin off GeForce basically, I was met with absolutely not. That's our. That's our DNA. That's our. That's our history. That's. You know, gaming is a. Is a huge part of our culture and it's. We would sooner cut off our left nut. No matter how small your left nut is relative to your entire body. This isn't exactly how they put it, but they would sooner cut off a key organ. Regardless of the size.

[Luke]

Hear me out. Everyone's gonna hate this. You know, if you're playing a video game and there's like the, this person, like that, that person. I'm gonna get a. Everyone hated that. Nvidia buys it releases a console.

[Linus]

Well, they would.

[Luke]

Beats the expected price for Steam machine.

[Linus]

It's arm based.

[Luke]

And the way that they do it is having it be a very low end machine that can play a lot of what you're playing a lot of the time locally, which is your friend slope, your. Whatever it's called Machine, whatever. Paint the shoot the gun game.

[Linus]

Yeah, something million, whatever it's called Mecha Chameleon.

[Luke]

You can play that. You can play golf with friends. You can play Peak and Play all those kind of things locally. And then when you want to play Indiana Jones and the Golden Circle, you

[Linus]

stream it from GeForce.

[Luke]

GeForce Now.

[Linus]

So, so, so in order to buy Xbox you don't just have to have the money, you have to have the hardware development expertise, you have to have the games industry software relationships, which they definitely have. The only companies that I could see having having any kind of a shot at buying the Xbox and doing it justice would be probably AMD and Nvidia or I mean, oh man, I guess intel technically could. They are technically a player and then what. So what Nvidia would do then is they would basically, just like they're doing with the RTX Spark right, is they would accelerate the move towards ARM based CPUs with GeForce graphics for gaming. They would use the leverage that they have with developers to, you know, basically, yeah, optimize for our GPUs. Oh, by the way, also it runs on this thing now. I think that there would be an expectation that they partner with Microsoft potentially on the operating system, at least for one generation or a couple generations. They've already built, to your point, they've already built the cloud streaming infrastructure that Microsoft considers a key part of the Xbox brand with their own streaming.

[Luke]

And as much as I hate it, and as much as people will yell when things like physical games and physical media gets taken away and stuff, people's buying patterns show that if they can take less pain now but higher consistent overtime pain later, they'll almost always go with that option. Debt loans, credit card payments, services like this. I've seen a lot of comments on the Steam machine saying that people wish that it was 3, 400 bucks but could just play games like Mecha Chameleon and whatever else if they effectively released that box. But you can also get more juice out of it when you need. By paying for, for GeForce now or whatever else. I could see people going for it. I think that's also a more natural route to something like GeForce now than pretty much anyone else is offering at the moment.

[Linus]

But I mean from Nvidia's perspective, I could also just see them going, well, yeah, but also just. We just don't need to do that at all. You know, we could just not. We, we're already building GeForce Now. Yes, we already are going to have, you know, RTX Spark.

[Luke]

We'll just sell the shovel that is GeForce now to some other company or whatever else.

[Linus]

Yeah, but I just, I just, I don't think I would, I don't think I could see anyone other than them pulling it off, doing it justice.

[Luke]

Could you see Sony buying them just for the studios?

[Dan]

No.

[Luke]

And the expertise or anything?

[Linus]

No. If anything, I mean Sony has been paring down their, their development teams as well. Right now. I don't think they're in a. I don't think they're in a big acquisition move. I mean what was that? What was that? Catastrophic?

[Luke]

I agree.

[Linus]

I was just poking game that they, that they launched for like a few days and they spent like hundreds of millions of dollars developing. Yeah, that's the one. Sorry, Concord.

[Dan]

I'm talking about Concord.

[Luke]

Yeah, Sony's been very frustrating because they had such a strong, they were the like strong single player game platform and honestly I think that's why they won a bunch of generations in a row. And then they seem to have just gotten so, they're just so enamored with live streams, hard ons for the whole live service.

[Linus]

Live service.

[Luke]

And it's like, it's not live service games.

[Linus]

It seems to be like just they

[Luke]

were trying to brute force single player.

[Linus]

I almost feel like you'd be better off just trying to brute force win the lottery then try to win in the live service game.

[Luke]

And if you win, it's massive.

[Linus]

Yeah, but you probably won't. Yeah, it really does seem like it

[Luke]

because that's an interesting comparison.

[Linus]

You could save yourself if, if Sony had spent. Apparently According to my AI overview here, Sony was estimated to have spent $400 million to develop Concorde. If Sony had bought $400 million in Lotto Max tickets,

[Luke]

I mean they would

[Linus]

have done better the work. They literally would have done better. Better because they at least wouldn't have lost the money that they would have

[Luke]

won the small prizes.

[Linus]

Yeah, they wouldn't have lost the money that they spent running the servers for it. Then at least they would have just, just put the money in an incinerator. That's the worst case scenario with the lotto.

[Luke]

You can't win little things.

[Linus]

Yeah, probably.

[Luke]

I don't, I literally, I don't think I've ever played a traditional.

[Linus]

So it depends how many numbers you get. I think I, I have, I have no familiarity beyond how 649 worked when I was a kid. So take that for what it is. But yeah, no, if, even if they bought like scratchers, they might have at least gotten, you know, 150 million here.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus]

Because, because a lot of like the, the odds a lot of the time are actually like mandated. Like they could have gone to the casino and just put it in the

[Luke]

slot machine, which is unfortunately super normal these days.

[Linus]

And gotten more money out of it than developing Concord. Yeah, I mean, obviously hindsight's 20 20, though. Like, I, you know, I'm not saying that I would have been a Sony exec and I would have been sitting around the boardroom table pitching, why don't we play slot machines? Like, obviously, yeah, they had to try something.

[Luke]

But I feel like you do that if you're trying to just completely trash on somebody's idea. That's the only. Because you're basically saying, Instead of deleting 400 million, why don't we delete 250 million or whatever.

[Linus]

Yeah. And I'm sure they didn't intend to.

[Luke]

So, like, it's, there's, there's no, like, super serious way to actually project that idea.

[Dan]

Oh, sure.

[Linus]

Hit us. Dan.

[Dan]

Yeah. Cody sent this comment. I have to read it to you. If Nvidia bought Xbox, they would rename it to RTXBox.

[Linus]

Thank you, Cody. That was actually worth waiting for.

[Luke]

That was pretty good job.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Luke]

Oh, man.

[Linus]

Where were we?

[Luke]

We kind of skipped a question you asked me. Would it be better to just not hire in a Valve way?

[Linus]

Yeah, right.

[Luke]

Or over hire in a Microsoft way?

[Linus]

And I'm just asking. I'm just asking questions. I'm just asking questions.

[Luke]

My default route would be to prefer to go the Valve way, but I

[Linus]

have to admit, it's not a terrible point, is it?

[Luke]

There is. Not only is it not a terrible point, the points that you made earlier, but also. Is it noble to have tried to create a job and have succeeded for some amount of time and then eventually fail? Or is it more noble to have never created the job in the first place but not have fired someone?

[Linus]

Like, tell me this. Okay, let's say, kind of tough, let's say.

[Luke]

I think the true answer is that there's a middle ground. I think Microsoft went way too hard. We knew that the whole time. We were calling it out the entire time as they were buying up too many studios and doing all this crazy stuff. And I think we've been chirping Valve for forever for being understaffed. I think there's a middle ground.

[Linus]

But, but let's, let's bring it closer to home. Like if, if Linus Media Group, if Umbrella Corporation were to say, look, something isn't working, is it, Is it better for those people to have been paid for two or three or five or ten years or however long it is and gain a bunch of experience that presumably they take with them somewhere else? Or is it better for me to have just taken all that money and put it in a dragon pile during that time? Like, I think that's the question.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And I don't know the answer.

[Luke]

I think in some cases it's tough and I think for certain people they're gonna see it different ways.

[Linus]

Well, yeah, I mean everything's, everything's easy to pontificate about. There's also, there's also philosophize about. Yeah, until it's, until it's your job. Yeah, until it's, until it's your art. Right. Like that's the thing you gotta remember, especially like games industry, content creation industry. This isn't just for a lot of the people who work here or who work at a game studio, this is not just a job. Like they're creating something. They put a little bit of their soul in everything they create.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And that's for sure. It's really cool.

[Luke]

And there's some, there's some, there's, there's different types of pain on both ends of the duration spectrum. Like if somebody just got hired and then that happened, there's a, there's a certain type of pain because they just left what might have been a fairly

[Linus]

stable job or disrupted their life or

[Luke]

moved or something like that. Yeah. And then there's the other one where like someone might be, you know, lifer level career dedicated to a certain place and then that gets bumped. Because when stuff like this happens, the layoffs are rarely clean. Like when Microsoft is announcing, hey, we did 1600 layoffs today and we're gonna be doing 1600 more by the end of the year.

[Linus]

There's no way that creates.

[Luke]

There's. For one. Yeah. And there's no way that that was clean. There's nowhere that like, of course there's gonna be people that maybe shouldn't be there for a variety of reasons. And at that volume, there's no way that you perfectly cut all of those. You know, you're gonna get some people that is a really bad loss for your company and you just didn't necessarily realize it when it was happening. Um, and that's going to burn them. And also it's interesting that they pointed out in here like, okay, Obsidian lost 90 people and now they're at the team size that they were at when they released Doom 2016. No, sorry, you mean Ed, what did I say?

[Linus]

Is that Obsidian and Doom?

[Luke]

So I assumed, I don't know why I said Obsidian. I meant id. I think I read that, but meant the other one because I was trying to find it in the notes. But yeah, id so the same size when they released Dune 2016. But are they at the same energy? And I can pretty much guarantee you no, because Doom 2016 coming out was kind of massive. I don't know necessarily how well the game sold, but that was a refresh of Doom. It was received super, super well. And the like engine was mind blowing. That was Vulcan. That was like the, the beginning of the change. Like that was a. That was a huge deal. A lot of people were talking about it. There's a lot of energy, there's a lot of positive momentum. There was a lot of potential energy. And then when you get half your workforce laid off and they're like, well, you're back the size you were when you release that.

[Linus]

Chop, chop now, real good game.

[Luke]

Keep going.

[Linus]

And you have all these extra years of experience. So surely you're much better at doing whatever it is that you do.

[Luke]

Yeah. Your potential energy is going to be real low.

[Dan]

Probably.

[Luke]

I assume so it sits. It's. These situations are tough.

[Linus]

I ugly man. I don't envy anyone involved. No. And to be clear, I'm sure there are absolute complete sociopaths at Microsoft involved in these decisions who don't care about the impact they're having. But I also genuinely believe in my heart of hearts that there are people for whom these decisions are are like agonizingly difficult. And then on the other side for the people who are losing their jobs, I'm sure there are people who were not really that engaged, who were looking elsewhere already. And on the other end of the spectrum, I'm sure there were people for whom working at this company was their. That was their life, their identity and they were.

[Luke]

What do you do? I work for Microsoft.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke]

I work at xbox.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke]

It's tough. And like, I don't know. We've talked about it on this show. I was told after we talked about Xbox a little while ago that Halo Infinite cost $800 million to make. Like something was gonna break here. It's been. Apparently they've been basically looting Minecraft and a couple other things, but mostly Minecraft for like years to make all these other things. And it just, it hasn't been working out. There's been a lot of duds along the way. There's been great games along the way as well.

[Linus]

But I mean we talked about this yesterday. I was. Or yesterday we talked about this last time on wan show where like I was Coming in ready to go guns blazing. How could you possibly do anything that harms double fine? And then we were looking at their games and we're like, wait, I'm sorry, this is your big game of the year. Pottery fighting each other. That had like a peak concurrent player count of like less than a couple thousand players or something like that. Like, oh my God, no. No wonder this isn't working.

[Luke]

Yeah, there's a discussion question again from David. I really like the questions he came up with this time. Other than Forza Horizon 6, when was the last system selling Xbox game, in your opinion?

[Linus]

Forza Horizon 5. And not everybody's into racing games. I don't give two shit about them.

[Luke]

I really like Forza Horizon 6. I would not buy a console for it. It's not, it's not a console selling game to me. It's a lot of people. It is, it's a. Oh, I agree. For me, it's still a fantastic add on. If I'm buying that console, I'm gonna get Forza Horizon 6.

[Dan]

Sure.

[Luke]

But it's not quite a console selling game for me. A good Halo. That's the thing, man. If they release one good Halo, we're back, baby. I'm not even kidding. I'm not even like, I can't even stress that enough. One good Halo game, everybody will come back. I like, I, it would happen.

[Linus]

You know what a funny thing is to me and I'm going to completely derail this, but like, why does it have to be Halo? Okay, there's. There's so many great special about Halo. There's, there's so many great intellectual properties out there. Like, how is it that Microsoft doesn't just go to Terry Brooks and be like, okay, we're gonna do Shannara, like, huh, it's like a fantasy novel. 15, 20 novels or something like that. Bestselling for like decades. Like there's IPs out there. You're Microsoft, you have.

[Luke]

Oh, I've seen this.

[Linus]

Enough money to buy the earth and all the heavens. Apparently there was a Shinra game back in the day. Okay, I had no idea. And Raken Claw says kids don't know those novels. Yeah, kids didn't know Halo either. It doesn't matter. The point is there's amazing. There's like, there's like an entire small home library worth of lore to mine here, license it and make a great new ip. Like why is it that we can only do like weird stuff like kiln fighter that no one cares about or

[Luke]

double fine, double Fine, that's true.

[Linus]

This is true. This is fair enough, but still. Or remake. Remake another remake something.

[Luke]

I think, I mean I just, I think they could. I'm just saying if you, if you want to knock it out of the freaking park, it's got to be Halo. If you want to do well, maybe Shannara or something like that. But if it's a new ip, I think it's going to be tough.

[Linus]

But you can't have. And you're probably right about like what the Frank first one needs to be. But they also have to just in the holster. They're going to have to have a lineup of new IPs, I think.

[Luke]

So you gotta blow it out of the park with Halo and then you gotta follow it up, which is, which is another problem that they have to be completely honest. But I'm, I'm looking this up. Somebody in chat said the last good Halo game was released by Bungie. So I wanted to go verify it. The last Halo game that Bungie released was Halo Reach. So that person is just completely correct. So we've talked about this on the show a bunch of times. One of my massive pet peeve things that has happened to a bunch of my favorite IPs, Star wars and Halo being two of them, is you get people that come in and they hire a team based around the idea of hiring people that hate the thing that they're building. This happened with Halo, you can go find it. They hired people to work on Halo who hated Halo. This happened with Star wars. You can go and find it. They hired people to work on Star wars that hated Star Wars. This can't be a thing. You can find people. And the reason why they did it for both is because they wanted to like renew it and bring some new ideas and stuff like that and make

[Linus]

it appeal to a broader audience.

[Luke]

Sure.

[Linus]

That's the key.

[Luke]

Halo appealed to everyone.

[Linus]

Enough people, it would have been fine.

[Luke]

Star wars also appealed to an incredible amount of people. I don't think that was needed for either ship management Sim Pillar of Autumn.

[Dan]

Come on, you play it.

[Linus]

There's so many genres that would be perfect.

[Luke]

I probably would.

[Linus]

Yeah, you would.

[Dan]

Hell yeah you would.

[Luke]

I like FTL style game, but a Halo would be sick.

[Dan]

And you're in charge of the Pillar of Autumn and you got to defend

[Luke]

it from Covenant Attack. Actually I know. My God. Like more highly produced FTL with more story involved and you getting the Pillar of Autumn out of this like horrible scenario. I would play the hell out of that.

[Dan]

Smaller teams like there's so many companies that ship out there. Like Star wars, the new. The New Gala Galactic Racers or whatever it's called that's coming out is done by the Burnout team. It's not done by like, just do something fun.

[Luke]

Okay. Yeah. But like, I don't know. I think 343 is going to need some type of a staffing refresh. Sorry.

[Linus]

Oh, actually, yeah, Galactic Racers coming really soon.

[Luke]

That game looks so cool.

[Linus]

October.

[Dan]

I'm stoked.

[Luke]

Oh, my God.

[Dan]

So stoked. Especially with the pedigree.

[Linus]

It does look legitimately.

[Luke]

So sick.

[Linus]

Insanely cool.

[Dan]

And this is what they could do with the Halo franchise. It's just be like, you know, oh, you're a studio and you make really good ship management sims. Here's our ip. Go and do something cool with that.

[Linus]

Yeah. How about we both win? You know, create Win. Win.

[Luke]

So dope.

[Dan]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke]

People being behind this is like a perfect fit.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus]

So cool.

[Luke]

Oh, that looks awesome.

[Dan]

Just give your IP to different studios.

[Linus]

Do not pre purchase it.

[Dan]

Don't pre purchase anything ever.

[Luke]

But even, like. Okay, even. That being said, and I completely agree with Dan, to be honest, I think you can do sidebar things. There's been a ton of examples lately. Mecha Chameleon is a great version of it where small fun games with your friends can sell like gangbusters. Do that kind of stuff with these IPs and in these universes, but keep them small games and keep them cheap and have them be group games that you can play with friends. And I think. I think it would go hard.

[Linus]

Like it's, It's. It's hard to do because people who succeed at doing something expect raises.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

You can't just keep things cheap.

[Dan]

You.

[Linus]

You could. What you could do is you could just lay off all the people who now are paid more and hire new, fresh people who are cheap. And you could keep costs down that way. But I guarantee you, nobody would like you for it.

[Luke]

Is that. Is that your employment track into the mainline game developer pool, though?

[Linus]

I mean, yeah, possibly. But then you. I think you just. You eventually end up with that pool being big, and then you end up with Concord, because what are they going to work on now?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Dan]

All right.

[Linus]

We should probably. Yeah. Andres528 says. Wait, is this still just the first topic?

[Luke]

Do we. Do we want to talk about Assassin's Creed now? It shouldn't be too long.

[Dan]

All right.

[Linus]

Oh, really? Luke is going to talk about an Assassin's Creed game. It won't be too long. Buckles in.

[Dan]

Do you want some more water? Maybe.

[Luke]

Okay. So I'll be here for hours. We could be. But I'll try. Okay. So first thing that's interesting to me is the reviews. I see mostly positive here. I don't remember how to break it out by region. Yeah. Can I see?

[Linus]

You can do by language on the left there.

[Luke]

Boom. Mostly negative, undersimplified Chinese.

[Linus]

Oh, interesting. Yeah. But don't they, like review bomb stuff if it has a bad translation, which makes sense.

[Luke]

I think they do that. But apparently I thought most of. Okay. So I do think that's a bit of a thing. And I mean. Yeah, that's fair.

[Linus]

Yeah, it is.

[Luke]

Language broken out, reviews.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And if the translation sucks, then sure. But what I've read online is that this isn't actually necessarily because the translation sucks.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

What I've read is that it's because of things like the microtransactions and stuff like that, which I think is kind of funny.

[Linus]

Wait, sorry. What? So Chinese gamers don't like microtransactions? Am I missing something here? Isn't that the land what brung us Genshin Impact?

[Luke]

It's the land what brung us many of those mechanics. But it's. It's. It's interesting to me because I don't know if my memory is perfect on this. I looked in the microtransaction store, so everyone was pissed about it. Yeah.

[Linus]

And horse armor. Right.

[Luke]

It seemed like the things that you could buy to me were effectively the same things that you could buy last time. So just like last time. I just won't.

[Linus]

Right.

[Luke]

And it's fine.

[Dan]

Right.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

So it didn't really bother.

[Linus]

You're not mad about that?

[Luke]

I mean, I don't like it. In every single Assassin's Creed game for a long time, there's been some type of really annoying mechanic, and you could just have it not be annoying for the low, low price of whatever they're charging for the thing. Like, you can get free treasure maps or you can get free, like, resources for your ship or whatever.

[Dan]

Got it.

[Luke]

But I just. Whatever. I'm not gonna do that. And other than that, it's fine. I saw some people pointing out, like, the graphics aren't that great, to be honest. For the price of the game and the fact that it's a re release, I think the graphics could be a lot better. I think the movement is clunkier than I remember, and I remember the movement being clunky. To be clear, I don't think I'M actually looking at it with rose tinted goggles. They also redid the combat because the combat.

[Linus]

What everyone liked.

[Luke]

The. The ship combat was what I liked. I don't know. I haven't actually unlocked the ship yet because I haven't played a ton. I think I played for like an hour.

[Dan]

The. But the.

[Luke]

The like ground based fighting combat to be kind of in between. I would say the new games which are more like RPG like combat. And the old games, which the old games were kind of weird. The combat was a little broken. You could just like perma counter and then you just sort of win. So it could be like a circle of people around you and you're still going to win the fight. Which is like a little absurd.

[Dan]

Right?

[Luke]

But the new games have the same kind of problem, but it's because it's an RPG and you're just like spamming abilities like in the new. In the. Not the newest. In the newest one I've played which is like three old at this point because I decided that I was gonna do every quest in the game before I finished it. And now I'm like over 100 hours in and I'm not even close. So I'm just never gonna play another Assassin's Creed game. As far as I can tell. I play it like twice a year at this point. I'm just still stuck. Anyways. I.

[Dan]

You.

[Luke]

You like my character has armor on it that makes people take more fire damage and I have an ability that lights my weapon on fire and then I will just light people on. Like this has. This is not Assassin's Creed anymore.

[Linus]

Right.

[Luke]

At all. The new games are just so far gone. But anyways, this one is. Is a totally different combat assassin.

[Linus]

Shouldn't you not be on fire?

[Luke]

No, I have a warhammer.

[Linus]

Right.

[Luke]

And I ride a horse into combat.

[Linus]

Right. Like an assassin does.

[Luke]

Totally. Yeah,

[Dan]

it's.

[Luke]

It's. Yeah. It's honestly going back and so I. The like first island you end up on, which is the tutorial. Are you kind of running around? I. For some reason, because I'm weird. I used to try to speed run that first tutorial island and without thinking I was just like 3/4 through it and I had done like full sprint. I remembered every single path and stuff and there was a nostalgia like, oh yeah, I'm kind of like home again. I haven't played this game forever. I used to play this game all the time and then the same kind of things were on me, which is that game until you get your ship sucks. And I don't have my ship yet. So it's just kind of like, okay, just wasting time until I get the only good part of this game. And then I'm sitting there playing the game, but my brain is too busy working on, like, why is Ubisoft so stupid? How did they release this game? Which. The only good part was the ships, and then they never released another. They didn't release, like, a ship game. They have other Assassin's Creed games that had ships in it, but they didn't understand that it wasn't the fact that it was Assassin's Creed and ships. It was just the fact that it was just ships. And then they finally announced Skull and Bones, and everyone's like, oh, wow, you're finally doing the most obvious thing in the world.

[Linus]

Quadruple A.

[Luke]

Great. And then they spent a billion years working on it, and they changed the idea so many freaking times, and they call it quadruple A. And then it blows. And then they sell it for, like, $3, and no one plays it anyways. And it's just like, what is wrong with you guys? And I think that's what a lot of the reviews are on. The game is just like, ugh, okay, you got me, right? I bought this nostalgia game for 80 Canadian dollars.

[Linus]

Did you really? It cost that much?

[Luke]

It costs 80 Canadian.

[Linus]

That's a lot.

[Luke]

I don't think I spent that much on it. I think there's been currency changes and stuff since then, but these are the. These are the prices. And then on launch, they did this, which is, like. I think someone told it up. It was, like, $85 worth of DLC. But to be clear, you don't need any of it. Just ignore it.

[Dan]

Whatever. Right?

[Luke]

And then people were also annoyed that, like, when you launch the game, you can flip through the menu and see the other Assassin's Creed games in a timeline and, like, launch them from there because they're really trying to get you onto the new Assassin's Creed Creed games. That doesn't really bother me. It takes four seconds to skip past it. Whatever. Like, there's things that are annoying, and there's things that I. I don't nes. I think people are overblown on, but ultimately, I just keep coming back. Coming back to, like, I am not surprised by this. Makes complete sense to me.

[Linus]

Wow, they're close. They're like almost a penny stock.

[Luke]

They're almost gone. And it's like, yeah, it makes sense. You've pissed away, like, almost every title you have.

[Linus]

Wow, that's kind of wild, actually.

[Luke]

And it was incredibly unnecessary.

[Linus]

Yeah. It's amazing how much Expedition 33 felt like what an Ubisoft.

[Luke]

Right.

[Linus]

Or Squaresoft game from their heydays should have been.

[Luke]

Yep.

[Linus]

Hey, just for fun, how many people do you think are playing Skull and Bones right now?

[Luke]

16.

[Linus]

Actually. No, quite a bit better than that.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

325.

[Luke]

Oh, wow. That's actually, like, genuinely a lot better than I would have thought.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

325. Good job, Ubisoft. How much did they spend making that? Hundreds of millions.

[Luke]

So much money. And, like, I just have to come back to again. Okay, when was. When was Skull and Bones announced?

[Linus]

Oh, man, a thousand years ago,

[Luke]

apparently. I've searched this before on this laptop.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Luke]

Officially announced in 2017.

[Linus]

For context, there's 6,000 people almost playing

[Luke]

Expedition 33 right now, and Skull and Bones is multiplayer.

[Linus]

Yikes.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Oh, yikes. So you would expect a longer tale in a multiplayer game. So it was announced in 2017, released in 2024. Pivoted on like a million times. Yeah, I just. I keep going back to, like, this is kind of similar to the Halo thing.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

We're like, man, they own. They own Splinter Cell. When's the last Splinter Cell game that's come out?

[Linus]

I actually don't know. The last full standalone game according to AI is splinter cell blacklist from August 2013. Bro.

[Luke]

What's going on, man? There's, like, no good single player FPS games. One released 007, and everybody's like, wow,

[Linus]

let's all play this.

[Dan]

All right.

[Linus]

We should move on. I think this is still our first topic. Is Dan even there anymore?

[Luke]

I don't think so.

[Linus]

And he's gone.

[Luke]

I think he abandoned us.

[Dan]

Nice.

[Linus]

Okay, what do you want to jump into?

[Luke]

Hannah Montana.

[Linus]

Really?

[Luke]

Let's come up for air. Hannah Montana Linux gets modern remaster after nearly two decades. Almost as long as it's been since Ubisoft released a good game. It's called Sweet Niblets, and Its new version, version 26, is built on Debian with a reskin of KDE Plasma. Developer and YouTuber Noah Kaggle has released this version, a modern remaster of the infamous 2009 meme distro that was abandoned. And almost immediately after release, there's a bunch of stats about it which no one's gonna care about.

[Linus]

Hot pink Hannah Min Montana branding. Very nice.

[Luke]

That hot pink, Hot pink Hannah Montana branding can be yours if you are using KDE Plasma 6. Where is it? The original 2009 legendary Linux meme. But, yeah, it's a skin for KDE so you don't actually have to get the probably best distro that there is. Hannah Montana Linux. If you want your system to be pink.

[Linus]

Pretty terminal.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

You could grab the background and you could scan your KDE and you'd be fine.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

Amazing new worlds.

[Linus]

Thank you.

[Luke]

You should do an. I switched.

[Linus]

Do we not even know who the original developer of Hannah Montana Linux was?

[Luke]

I don't think so. I think it was anonymous.

[Linus]

That is. That's pretty wild. You can still download it by the way. But it would be. We. We actually did a video a little while ago trying out random weird Linux distros and Hannah Montana Linux was one of them and I don't think we were even able to get it working without using a VM or something like that. Like, I think it required a workaround. Don't quote me on that. I know, I know some of them did more usable than Temple os. I'll give it that. Okay, well thank you for that. Why don't I pick something?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Did you know this? This blew my mind. Did you know that you can play Half Life 2 at over 100 frames per second?

[Luke]

Yes.

[Linus]

In your browser?

[Luke]

Wow.

[Linus]

I'm gonna do it right now.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

That's actually sick.

[Linus]

Developers Sliquent MM reportedly a high school student and 98006 have I think sure have released a fully playable browser port of Half Life 2 after about three months of work. The game runs natively in your browser, using webassembly to run the Engine code and WebGL2 to talk directly to your GPU. It saves files live in your browser's storage and the full developer console works for cheats. It reportedly can hit over 100fps maxed out even on integrated graphics, which I have considerably better than right here thanks to our laptop partner Razer. The site serves the entire game for free with no proof of ownership check. And the port is built on leaked source engine code. So there is no sign whatsoever that Valve has authorized any of this. Valve has historically been pretty chill about fan projects, but this one leans a little closer to full on piracy, taking of their ip which as we remember from dbrand's companion Cube adventure, Valve don't take kindly to known bugs include characters, rendering with empty eye sockets since the facial animation system is had to be disabled entirely to keep the port stable. And I'm going to give it a shot. I've got my. Got my gaming mouse in my backpack here.

[Luke]

Specifically a gaming mouse for gamers.

[Linus]

Yes, for gamers it's like. Oh yeah, no, it's okay. Yeah, it's a Super Strike Xbox.

[Luke]

Fair enough.

[Linus]

Definitely for gamers.

[Luke]

All right. How do you like it?

[Linus]

I haven't actually used it for gaming much. This will be the first time I've actually gamed on it.

[Luke]

That sounds very lightest.

[Linus]

I've just been using. Using it as my mouse. That sounds very Linus. Yeah.

[Luke]

For like work inviting this guy to play video games for months. Dude.

[Linus]

Yeah. You never message me. That is so not even true. When's the last time you messaged me to play games?

[Luke]

I talked to you about it literally last week.

[Linus]

When did you message me to play games?

[Luke]

All right, I'll do that then.

[Linus]

Yeah, that's what I thought.

[Luke]

I'll do that then.

[Linus]

Next time think before you talk. I don't remember where that line is from. That's a line though. It's not. That's not how I talk to him usually.

[Luke]

I can't believe you've done this.

[Linus]

Okay, okay, so here we go. Web Half Life 2. Okay. Oh wow. You can even. You can play episode one and episode two. Where's episode three? Hold on, let me try and scroll here. Hahaha. I'm just kidding. Okay, downloading map. Background 01, full screen. Obviously. I don't know how long this is going to take.

[Luke]

It takes a wee bit. It will. I did it on mine already.

[Linus]

Oh, you did? Oh, okay. Cool. Sick.

[Luke]

Oh, I didn't. Full screen mine.

[Linus]

Here we go. Oh yeah, no, that's fine.

[Dan]

You're good.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

New game. Okay.

[Linus]

Can I go to a different chapter? Evidently. Nope. I don't remember how this interface works, so.

[Dan]

Sure. Start new game.

[Linus]

Let's go.

[Dan]

Or wait.

[Linus]

Oh shoot. I should have checked the options. Get more resolution.

[Luke]

Time to be stuck for a while, I think.

[Linus]

Okay, cool.

[Luke]

Oh, never mind.

[Linus]

Okay, while we get through, maybe like some cutsceney stuff, should we do a quick top. Oh, a CW announcement and then explain and do two comms? My screen is covered.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, I got it.

[Linus]

Cool.

[Luke]

End of season. End of season apparel sale.

[Linus]

Oh yeah, we've got lots of good stuff in here.

[Luke]

Apparently the discount has increased from 30% to 40%.

[Linus]

Yeah. So if you're. If you're a size that we are having trouble moving for a particular product, or if there's something that appeals to you at 40% off but didn't appeal to you at full price, now is a great time to pick up end of season apparel over on lttstore.com and it's an especially great Time to pick something up right now because we have comms live where your messages just add an item to your cart. Check out, show them the flow. Oh, that hat. I love that hat. I wear that hat every day lately. It's a sick hat. LAN hat. Is it in stocking? Both sides. Oh, there's not that many left of the mediums. There you go. Anyway, the point is, add an item to your cart and you will see our checkout messages interface. That will go as soon as you place your order. That will go to producer Dan. There he is.

[Luke]

Hey.

[Linus]

He'll reply to it or he'll just pop it up on the screen like that one from Stephanie R. Up there. Or he will curate it for me and Luke to respond to. It's all up to him. He has the power. Was I going to say something else? Yeah. So now's a really good time to pick up something from our end of season apparel sale. Yay. We're doing things more like an actual fashion company now.

[Dan]

So that's.

[Linus]

That's a whole thing. Bridget talked me through it. She's basically like, yeah, you can't. You can't do things like you guys do them. And I was like, why not? And she's like, because that's not how people do them. And I'm like, oh, okay.

[Luke]

That's a pretty good conversation.

[Linus]

Well, pretty much. It's not quite how it went.

[Luke]

What else is interesting is that the sale runs until July 23rd at 10:00am PST.

[Dan]

All right.

[Luke]

Also, our true spec USB cables are fully stocked with all speeds, lengths and connector combinations available. Whether you need a tiny desk cable or a long charging cable, it's now a time to grab yours at LMG GG truespec.

[Linus]

Every once in a while he has Jay Leno's chin. That's an older reference.

[Luke]

Still checks out.

[Linus]

Okay, so, Dan, you want to hit us with a couple of comms?

[Dan]

Sure. Hello, fellow checkout commies. Luke. I'm excited.

[Linus]

Okay. That's probably the best one we've seen since the switch to checkout messages.

[Dan]

I do like that. I'm excited to see you at Open Sauce. I'm running a CTF at a booth there. Any interesting stories from community conferences like Open Sauce or defcon?

[Luke]

Interesting stories.

[Linus]

I remember you were talking about, like, some cool, just like, like hijacking, like, like wireless hijacking. Stuff that was just for LOLs, like not super malicious or anything.

[Luke]

At Defcon, probably. There's some really interesting stuff at Defcon. Every year there was a pretty cool, like, Baby's first intro to hacking in

[Dan]

the,

[Luke]

like, astro security area where they had some, like, space security teams, which was really interesting to hang out and talk to. And then they had this thing where it, like, it taught you how, you know, I mean, lots of satellites are just like, open. It's just most people aren't going to know how to communicate with them at all. That's like basically your security layer and how hacking some especially very old satellites is more about, like, can you find any information on it at all?

[Dan]

Right.

[Luke]

And if you can and you can get a signal up there, you might just be able to take it over, which is pretty interesting. I remember there was this thing from a bajillion years ago where people took over, like, an abandoned McDonald's, set up a massive satellite dish so they could, they could take a bunch of. A bunch of satellites. This is a long time ago, but yeah, I mean, defcon I have very weird experiences with. Because I show up to defcon, walk the floor for like, half an hour, and then disappear into a hotel room until the last half an hour of the show. Because I just work on Gold Bug.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

The, like, challenges.

[Luke]

Yeah. So, like, I. I don't know. The interesting things that happen for me are like solving those, those puzzles. If you look up Gold Bug Crypto Village, you'll find the, the page for that and the interesting things there. But that's just. That's just like puzzle, puzzle figure outing at Open Sauce. It's. It's mostly like just meeting people that just have the most interesting interests. I really like walking around the, like, community booth area. Unsurprisingly to me, the hobbyist rocketry area was super interesting. Seeing what some of the kids in school are like, machining the, the 3D printing revolution. What it's done for hobbyist rocketry is, like, amazing. That's. Obviously there's. There's some really cool stuff you can follow on YouTube there as well. But seeing not just the people on YouTube, seeing people that are just, you know, doing it as part of a university club or high school club or whatever. It's been really fun. Yeah.

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Luke]

I don't think I have, like a, you know, super exciting story.

[Linus]

No one asked me, but the last time I was at an event, it wasn't that event, but Michael Reeves, like, almost died, so that was interesting. I sent Dan a picture.

[Luke]

Almost died.

[Linus]

I mean, maybe not, but he could have.

[Luke]

I feel like that's a lot of his life.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

He didn't seem fazed by it at all. Dan, do you want to put up that picture I sent you? So he was. He was going around this corner very fast. These. These carts. These are electric carts that do not fuck around.

[Dan]

And.

[Linus]

And his wheel fell off. Just fell off. Like it could have happened at any moment. On a track that was very put together with little tiny flags like this. And not a lot there's. Yeah.

[Luke]

This feels very open source. Michael Reeves doing something dangerous on a thing that is attached to an engine in wheels on a track that was thrown together somewhat shoddily. Feels very open source coded.

[Dan]

Yeah. So,

[Linus]

yeah, pretty much.

[Luke]

Oh, Michael.

[Dan]

No.

[Linus]

So that was fun.

[Luke]

He's awesome. And yeah, open source is wild, man. I don't even know how to like, explain it. It's. I'm happy that they somehow still get permits to run that show.

[Linus]

Dan, do you want to hit us with another?

[Dan]

Sure. They get permits for Luke again, who seems like he might be into it. Have you ever tried wing foiling or any other wind or foil sports evolving very quickly over the last few years? Buying to use during board setup and teardown. What did they buy?

[Luke]

They bought wing foiling, screwdriver, bit hex

[Dan]

and bit set Torx. And the bit case.

[Luke]

How to wing foil.

[Dan]

I think it's like a surfboard with a wing on it.

[Luke]

It's like a kite.

[Linus]

Are we gonna show your screen?

[Luke]

Sure. I think this is it.

[Dan]

That seems like the one.

[Linus]

It looks like. It looks like he's holding like a big inflatable thingy or something.

[Dan]

It's got a water foil.

[Luke]

Yes.

[Dan]

Yeah. So your board is the one with the foil.

[Luke]

The like kite power, wind power that you're collecting from the foil. I guess the sail, inflatable sail, foil, wing thing.

[Dan]

Now the foil is the board that comes out of the water because it's got a wing under the water. Wing. Wing.

[Luke]

Right. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. No, I mean, that seems super cool. I have always been not good at sports that don't have fully independent foot movement or hitting. I gotta have hurt do tend to do a little bit better in those

[Dan]

five fun other people. No, that's one other people.

[Luke]

That's type one.

[Dan]

You inflict pain onto other people.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah. No, So I. I mean, it sounds cool, but yeah, I'm normally like skateboarding, not so much. Rollerblading. Yes. That was usually where. Where my brain went. Independent foot movement. I did better with if both my feet got to be stuck on something.

[Linus]

You're okay at snowboarding, aren't you?

[Luke]

I'm okay. I would probably Be a lot better at skiing. I've always had that thought. I've never wanted to switch.

[Linus]

For the first time in over 20 years. Like, 25 years recently.

[Luke]

That's not true. Oh, skied.

[Linus]

Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't skied since I was a minor, I think.

[Luke]

I've never skied.

[Dan]

You look like a skier, Luke. You don't have the kind of snowboard vibe.

[Luke]

What is that?

[Dan]

What is.

[Linus]

That means you're not cool.

[Luke]

I think that's what he said.

[Linus]

You know what?

[Dan]

No, no, no. So I'm a skier, so I think the opposite.

[Linus]

Snow. Snowboarding. Snowboarding is not a dick. Skiing school now. So they're like, back in the. In the 90s, like. Like all the kids wanted to snowboard. Snowboarding was the coolest thing ever. And skiing was like, for. For grandpa. Basically.

[Dan]

That's why I'm a ski and.

[Linus]

Not anymore. Not anymore. Now skiing school, you know, it kind

[Luke]

of makes sense to me because I feel like, am I going to be just way off on this? Like, if you look at how people used to play video games.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

RPG games. I'm not gonna wear that armor. I know it's better, but it looks bad.

[Linus]

Mmm.

[Luke]

Snowboarding. If you look at. Nowadays, I will look like a complete weird clown. Or I will pay money to skin my stuff so it looks better. But I will always wear the most performant things. And I'm gonna check my stats. I'm gonna try to be better than everyone. It's competitive, and I'm gonna practice and

[Linus]

blah, blah, blah, Min.

[Luke]

Max hall of fame skiing.

[Linus]

Interesting.

[Luke]

That's my theory.

[Dan]

Good theory. I agree.

[Linus]

I also.

[Luke]

Skiing is like. And snowboarding is more like.

[Linus]

I mean, you can tuck on either.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah. But usually the borders are carving and having fun for style points and doing tricks and stuff.

[Linus]

I don't know, man. For the longest time, if anything, snowboarders had the reputation for just tucking down the hill and, like, running people over and stuff, versus, like, you know, skiers. Because it was the dem. It was a demographic issue. Like, it was a bunch of young, irresponsible dudes on snowboards.

[Dan]

Cool kids.

[Linus]

Yeah, exactly.

[Luke]

That's interesting. I. I've had more experience with annoying skiers flying down mountains, but I think

[Dan]

both sides are pretty brutal.

[Linus]

This is fair. So, unfortunately, I seem to have crashed it. I went up this ladder, which may have been like a loading point. I don't know what clear cache does, but. Okay, I can. Oh, no.

[Luke]

Take a guess.

[Linus]

Yeah, well, I don't know what cache.

[Dan]

It's clearing Luke, I think that was a loading point.

[Linus]

Yeah, so. So if I. Can I load. Okay. Can I load this auto save? Because it's been working.

[Luke]

I've. I've heard you going around.

[Linus]

Hold on full screen. I. I've been. I've been going around. Okay.

[Dan]

So here.

[Linus]

I guess this is about as good as it's gonna get.

[Luke]

Ooh, look at those rays.

[Linus]

Yeah, right. Oh, wow. Wow.

[Luke]

What RTX card are you running this on?

[Linus]

It's amazing. How much of my phones. Looking back on my life, how much of it did I spend without these rays?

[Dan]

Are you gonna. Are you a can putter away or getting beaten Half life player?

[Linus]

Oh, I can't hear what he's saying that. Hold on.

[Dan]

Let me try again.

[Linus]

Bet. Hold on, hold on.

[Dan]

He's getting beaten guy.

[Linus]

No, I'm gonna try again. Bet.

[Luke]

This feels very Linus coated.

[Dan]

This is our savior.

[Linus]

This is how I played Star Citizen.

[Luke]

Yeah, it works. I think.

[Dan]

I think that's valuable for the Star Citizen community. Here we go. Professional physicist. Try to answer every possible.

[Linus]

Okay, so. Yeah. Where.

[Dan]

Where's my.

[Linus]

Where's my ladder at?

[Dan]

Turn around.

[Linus]

No, I won't. I don't want to. I want to go through here. I'm gonna open this. Precinct 13.

[Luke]

This. This is why you break Linux. And this is why you're a good QA tester.

[Dan]

Go to Nova, Prospect like a good boy.

[Linus]

No, I don't want to. I'm gonna go in there. I like all the blood in the room. It's pretty. It's red. Free teeth. They're like the ducks at the park. You can take as many as you want.

[Dan]

Hey.

[Linus]

Oh. So, no, that wasn't a loading spot then. Interesting. Say. Oh, that was a bit of a glitchy moment. I think that's a dead guy. Yeah, basically. It was not good. I'm surprised you don't know who that is.

[Dan]

I might.

[Luke]

I'm just really bad with names.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Pretty rough. All right, why don't we jump into our next topic? This is it. I am pretty impressed at how well that's running. That's kind of crazy. And this was a couple of. This was a couple of high school students.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

That's. That's incredible.

[Luke]

Really good job.

[Linus]

Yeah. Wild. All right. Hey. On the subject of Valve Solo, German game developer Zorro Arts said that his co op boat game Paddle Paddle Paddle has been refunded over 55,000 times out of roughly 270,000 copies sold in its first year. A roughly 21% refund rate, which. Okay, on the surface is not a huge problem. Right. Except that the game sits at 90% positive reviews. So how is it that you can have 80% of people not refunding it if 90% of people review it positively? Discuss. So actually you don't need to discuss because the answer is pretty clear. Steam's policy grants Automatic refunds under 14 days of ownership. Okay. And under two hours of playtime. And while the game was designed around three and a half to four hours of play, speedrunners and skilled players are rolling credits inside the two hour window. So you'll actually see reviews like dozens of reviews, openly saying things like, great game finished within an hour and 40 minutes, refunded at an average $4 sale price. We're talking about $158,000 in refunded revenue. Now Zoroarts is careful to say that he supports Steam's refund policy as a player. Right. And he's not asking for the refund policy to be removed, but his suggested fix is having Steam display an expected completion time next to the price on every store page. So short games aren't punished for being short. I don't know if that solution would really work either necessarily.

[Luke]

Maybe you could do an average.

[Linus]

Are you showing the gameplay?

[Luke]

Yeah, it would be interesting to maybe have like an average amount of time players played this game for and an average completed time.

[Linus]

That wouldn't tell. Yeah, that wouldn't tell you that much about it because like I was blown away by how many achievements I got in Expedition 33 for like just being a third of the way through the story, like the percentage of people who bought this game and just I don't never played it, so I don't know how.

[Luke]

The percentages for Those things on 007 are very high. It's a very good game. Lots of people are playing.

[Linus]

Oh really?

[Luke]

And lots of people are playing it through. I'm not done the game yet, but I, I don't know, I feel like I'm pretty far into it. I've played a decent amount and I wonder how many people are playing right now. Steam stats? Oh yeah, 3313 people playing right now. Single player shooter game that was released like two months ago seems not bad.

[Linus]

Cat Os says it doesn't help that there's YouTubers doing challenges of speedrunning a game and then getting a refund.

[Luke]

I have heard of that before.

[Linus]

That's, that's, that's pretty brutal.

[Luke]

Well, their thing is they have to keep buying it every time they fail or something. Right?

[Dan]

I I also don't think that they refund it. They just try.

[Luke]

So they buy, they have to buy it every time they try it.

[Dan]

I don't know. But it's still content that's out there. Yeah.

[Luke]

So, yeah, this one,

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Luke]

I do think. I mean, do they tell people that it's like it's gonna, you're gonna play it for an hour? Because like, I know they're saying like it would be nice if Steam put something there, but I think they also don't.

[Linus]

Gas Racing says if you, if you get the game complete achievement, you shouldn't be able to refund. But like, I'm gonna put one of

[Dan]

those on the menu.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

If you make your game 10 minutes long, like, I could, I could maybe

[Linus]

understand it probably wouldn't have positive reviews. So that's, that's, that's where this is a, this is a really unique case. I mean, maybe. Yeah, maybe the solution is that they just put a. They put an additional, they put an additional condition in. So two hours, two weeks, two quarters of the game, you know, or something like that.

[Dan]

How do you define a quarter?

[Luke]

How do you find.

[Linus]

Yeah, I was going for half the game.

[Luke]

No, I know. How do you define half the game?

[Linus]

I don't know.

[Luke]

That's really tough because what if I spend a bajillion years in Act 1 of BG3?

[Linus]

Well, then you'll. But then you'll go over two hours, right? So it's one of.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because this game, I don't know, I could, I could understand buying this game and then playing it for an hour and being done and feeling bamboozled because what freaking game is an hour long? I know people are saying two hours, but two hours is the limit. There's a lot of people in the reviews saying that they played for an hour. That being said, it's on sale right now for less than four Canadian rubles. The very cheap game. If I had a good time with this and I played it for an hour and it was $4, I'm not going to be way too upset.

[Linus]

There's, there's definitely things that I could do for an hour that cost more than $4.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

So like, I, I don't know, I do think some type of visibility on it could be cool. But I also really don't look back fondly on the days of everybody screaming at game developers obsessing to make longer

[Linus]

games about how long is the game? Like, I don't even. Yes, a lot of People are screaming for longer games, but for me it's more just like defining the value of a game by how long it is is like defining the value of code by how many lines it is. Like, it's not.

[Luke]

I always hated that.

[Linus]

Portal is such a prime example of a game that just completely bucked that trend. And its shortness was its greatness. If it had been twice as long, it wouldn't have been as good. In fact. Controversial take. Sorry. I did not enjoy Portal 2 as much as I enjoyed Portal 1. It wasn't as fresh. It was longer.

[Dan]

Felt not a controversial take.

[Linus]

I think it felt more drawn out. I just didn't.

[Luke]

I like Portal 2, but I like Portal 1 more.

[Linus]

I did not enjoy it as much as I enjoyed Portal 1. And yeah. Oh, West 27 in float plane chat says Titanfall 2. Another prime example in a night. Yes.

[Luke]

And it's absolutely worth it.

[Dan]

I wish I didn't have to. I wish. I wish it was longer.

[Luke]

But they do a really good job of. They take the good thing away before it becomes bad.

[Dan]

It's like a tight script.

[Luke]

They don't let you get tired of anything.

[Linus]

It's amazing. Spoiler alert. That, like, that, like, time shifting mechanic.

[Dan]

I just literally all of it.

[Linus]

I just wanted to play with that for the rest of the game.

[Dan]

House building thing.

[Luke]

It could have literally only been. Yeah, it could have literally only been that.

[Linus]

Yeah. That would have been an entire game.

[Luke]

Yep. Easily.

[Linus]

You know what? Even though it got a little tedious for me, just because it was, like, kind of easy. It Takes Two did a pretty good job of that.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus]

Introducing. Did you ever play it?

[Dan]

No.

[Linus]

Oh, it's. It's a great play with the wifey on the couch game because it's accessible enough that, like, she can do it even if she's not a hardcore gamer.

[Luke]

She just wants to play Pocopia now.

[Linus]

Fair enough.

[Luke]

That was a highly successful purchase.

[Linus]

But a nice thing about it is that it gives you a new mechanic. It gives you a short tutorial for how to use it. It sets you loose in a world where you have to use it to solve a bunch of problems and then it rips it away.

[Luke]

Yeah. Good.

[Linus]

Never to be seen again.

[Luke]

Yeah. Someone said also Assassin's Creed and that.

[Dan]

Oh, that's. Yeah.

[Linus]

What I. I tried really hard to like Assassin's Creed.

[Luke]

It's not your kind of game.

[Linus]

I own. What's that supposed to mean? Is it too cerebral?

[Dan]

Linus likes good games.

[Luke]

You like Anno. How could I say that? Doesn't Work.

[Linus]

I tried.

[Luke]

Really not cerebral enough.

[Linus]

I tried really hard to get into Assassin's Creed multiple times. I'm gonna. I would have to check my. My Steam play history in order to know, like, which one I ultimately tried to play at some point, but I. I just couldn't. I just got bored. I did not. I do not care for Assassin's Creed. I do not care for it. I'm sorry. What you got there?

[Luke]

Yeah. He said the older Assassin's Creed games are shorter. 15 hours if you speedrun the campaign. And 41 to 45. Who plays an adventure game?

[Linus]

Speed running.

[Luke]

That's what I'm saying. Like, I don't think Assassin's Creed was ever like a short game.

[Linus]

Oh, wow. I. I do not own Assassin's Creed on Steam. I own it on a disc. I do own it. I know vat and I see it not in my account. So that's where we're at on that. All righty then.

[Luke]

Yeah, I got bored with AC Black Flag, actually. I never actually beat Assassin's Creed. Black Flag. Random fun fact. I talk about the game all the time. Never beat it.

[Linus]

Oh, that's the one that you're trying to. 100% all the stuff. No.

[Luke]

Oh, that's Assassin's Creed 4.

[Dan]

Got it.

[Luke]

That's the one that just got remastered.

[Dan]

Nice.

[Luke]

I never. I talk about it all the time. I played it on stream a bunch. I played it in general a bunch. I got it pre release because they gave it to us for like, benchmarking review. And I was on the top of every leaderboard for every category.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Luke]

Just. I loved that game. Never beat it. Never had any interest at all in beating it. Because to beat it, you have to go on land. Didn't care.

[Dan]

Nice.

[Luke]

Didn't care at all. That's true.

[Linus]

Okay, hold on. We have one more question, so. Oh, yeah, no, forget it. Okay. I do have a note about Steam's refund policy. Slash, just game purchasing policy, if anyone from Valve is watching. I know you're not, but whatever. It's worth a shot. I want to talk about my experience trying to buy the Jackbox 10 pack recently. It was really annoying. I forget if it was on sale for Steam summer sale or if it was just a deal because it was a bundle. But basically I saw a price I liked and I was like, you know what? I like Jackbox games. I play them, like, when I'm out and about at other people's houses. We do like, pool parties and other kinds of get togethers, and it'd Be nice to be able to just like fire up jackbox on this TV and people can play jackbox games. It's like a great little, you know, icebreaker. And I was like, I'll just get them all because whatever I can. And then I couldn't because I already owned Party Pack four or something. And so if you already own one, you cannot buy a bundle that contains that item.

[Luke]

That's. That doesn't feel normal.

[Linus]

No, it doesn't. I would think.

[Luke]

No.

[Linus]

Like, I feel like I thought you used to get. No, I don't expect a discount, but I thought what you used to get was a giftable code for the one you already had.

[Luke]

No, usually you get a discount based

[Dan]

on some of the bundles, the value of discount or. Yeah, multi copy.

[Linus]

So then I was like, okay, fine, well it's still a way better deal if I literally delete this game from my account and then buy the 10 pack. So I deleted it from my account, which you, you like, you removed it from my library and I tried to buy the 10 pack and it wouldn't let me. Now, to Valve's credit, they have a great little mechanism where you can restore an item that you have removed from your library. But because of that, it wouldn't let me buy the stupid thing because I already had it. Even though it was not in my library, it wasn't actually removed from my account. So I think you have to actually contact them. People in the chat are saying that it could be down to the developer to set that up.

[Luke]

Maybe. Yeah, because I've ran into this a number of times and it's, it's always a, a discount based on the value of what you already own. So that is very interesting. Like I even know when Slave Spire 2 came out. Yeah, they, they did a thing where they made it so that you could have a discount if you own Slave Inspire one. And the way that they did that was they made a bundle that was Slave Spire one and Slave Spire two. So if you just go to buy the bundle, it would give it to you at a discounted price because you would get the bundle discount, which was like 10% off or whatever. But it would only be on the one game. So yeah, maybe it's, maybe it's developer controlled. There's a lot of developer controls on

[Linus]

Steam, so that makes sense. Well, I don't know. I was, I was very annoyed. People are asking if I contacted Steam support. I was in a hurry. We had. It was. There was a party there.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

So I was, I was very annoyed.

[Luke]

I feel like Jackpot games. I don't know why I had this thought, but I feel like out of probably almost most games on Steam, they're probably bought in a hurry more than almost any other one. That makes sense because people are like, oh, God, I have a bunch of people at my house. I don't know what to do. The Jackpot games, whatever, we'll play this thing that.

[Linus]

That actually makes a ton of sense. All right, we can. We can move on from that. What are we supposed to be doing, Dan?

[Dan]

More topics?

[Linus]

I think we've. I think we've done a lot of topics, haven't we? Oh, we should do that. All right. The show is brought to you by Squarespace. First impressions matter, especially when you're trying to build a client or customer base. When someone cross comes across your website, you need to make it easy to use and understand, or else those potential shoppers are just going to leave. You're a respectable business, not a municipality. What does that mean? Oh, this. Oh, lordy. This is a real website. Wow. Thankfully, our sponsor, Squarespace, makes it easy to build a website for your business that does just that. To get started, you just pick from one of their stylish templates or create something more custom with their design intelligence tool. It's more than just looks, though. There's space, plenty of tools under Squarespace's hood that will help with things like SEO and monetization. From there, you can keep track of how your business is doing, adjust your website on the fly, and make sure that potential visitors will get the most out of what you have to offer. We've even used Squarespace for our own website at Linus Media Group.com where, by the way, I think we have some job postings up, so maybe go check that out. Including we're. We're hiring a head coach for coaching at Smash Champs. So if you're a badminton nerd like Turbo Turbo Turbo Nerd, like run ahead coaching program, then maybe go check that out anyway. You can start building your website today and get 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com when it's really easy to manage. Like HR can do all the postings. I think Colton was in charge of it for years.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

The show is also brought to you by MSI. Just like an Ogre or an Onion, MSI knows that a good monitor has layers and the MPG X24QD OLED has five display layers working in tandem to help it maintain its peak HDR brightness at 1000 nits with lower power consumption. The monitor is true bright certified, which means the brightness is measured based on how the human eye sees it versus just a raw output number. And if you're worried about image burn, MSI's OLED Care 3.0 uses sensors to help reduce. To help reduce the risk of an image of Shrek sticking around for too long. Is that a Shrek toaster? That's amazing. And that's all backed by a three year burn in warranty. Their dark armor film offers deeper blacks as well as additional scratch resistance on the screen itself. And it's also sleek in design, so if you don't have a ton of desk real estate, you'll be totally fine. It'll fit with limited space without unnecessary clutter, so grab your mpg322 ur qdoled x 2024 monitor using our link right there.

[Dan]

There it is.

[Linus]

Hello, link. Oh, and we're supposed to do our float plane announcements.

[Luke]

Also, I just want to say someone in chat has some jackbox games went to go do the same thing you did. Same thing happened.

[Linus]

Okay, so I'm not imagining it.

[Luke]

That's not you imagining it. And it's. And it's. My guess at that point is it's got to be developer related because I've had it happen the other way multiple times. So yeah, makes sense.

[Linus]

It's always nice to know that I'm not totally crazy all the time.

[Luke]

I thought you'd like that.

[Linus]

All right. Not only do we have another early release for our floaters, but we have another video that is exclusive to Floatplane that was three years in the making. My motorcycle is finally done after three years in the shop. Luke won. He completed Final Fantasy 6 before I got there. But I got there eventually. That's me aboard the turbo pink motorcycle. Freaking love it. Also, I'm supposed to. I think I'm supposed to go and release a video now. I forget how to do this. Wait, where's that.

[Dan]

Am I.

[Linus]

Where's the cms? Oh, okay, sure. The interface looks kind of. Oh, oh, oh. Are we releasing this video? Where is it? Ah, hold on. Wait, What? Is he gonna tell me which video I'm releasing? It just says not only do we have an early release, he doesn't tell me which video to release. Oh, here it is. Oh yeah. Okay, check this out. The 115 inch true RGB TV. Samsung. Excuse me, Samsung. Sony's new flagship is here. And I and a man who own a display get to unbox it and he gets to experience it for the first Time. It's absolutely flipping. Mind blowing. It's like so cool. Hold on. Where was.

[Luke]

There's also. There's a forklifting exclusive. There's the next episode of the thing. The name of it, oh wizard is not released yet.

[Linus]

Not released yet.

[Luke]

Never mind.

[Linus]

Sammy gave me a timestamp that I'm supposed to go look at. One second here. 1927.

[Dan]

Hold on.

[Linus]

Where are we at? 1927. Good year. That's too close. I was not actually really going that fast. I'm very pleased. It just looks really fast. I. Seriously, I was going like 40.

[Luke]

No, I. It's the. It's the.

[Linus]

It just sounds really good.

[Luke]

The closeness effect. Oh, yeah. And it sounds great.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

I'm not really that into that. Into like. Oh, yeah. But the. The bike does sound really good. No, not miles per hour. Kilometers per hour. Kilometers per hour. I was not going that fast. Sammy did a great job. He made me do it twice because he. He missed the shot on the first go around. Yeah. You nailed it. Good job, Sammy. All right. Oh, right. I should probably talk about that. So. Yeah, get all of this and more at lmg, gg, Slash fpwan. Join all the cool peeps over on floatplane. Also, if you.

[Dan]

I.

[Linus]

We already talked about like checkout messages and stuff. But hey, if you're looking for something else to pick up over on the store, we have all of our cables in stock right now. Yeah, they are the number one seller every day. People are freaking loving our true spec cables. We still only have type C to C and type A to C. But sure, it's a cable, says Mario M.

[Luke]

But what a cable.

[Linus]

What a cable. It lives up to its name. Fast charges with a cable that doesn't kink and a shielded with a strong rubber that looks like it's built to last. A Bravo, Bravo cable. Bravo.

[Luke]

I have found it's pretty nice.

[Linus]

This is hilarious. They are 5 inches long. They are 5 inches long. The photos don't show that variant. 40 gigabit per second, 0.32ft. What were you expecting, sir?

[Luke]

What? What?

[Linus]

We don't have a different picture for every length of the cable. Also, 5 inches is a lot. It's way more than average. Is it?

[Dan]

No, average is like seven.

[Luke]

Hi, dad. You're gonna crush some souls. Dan. Relax. Relax.

[Linus]

Wow. Wow.

[Dan]

Neither of you are being like, oh, thank God, Dan.

[Linus]

Viewership's dropping like a rock. Way to go, Dan.

[Luke]

Everybody ran away from. Grab a measuring tape.

[Linus]

Oh, Lordy. Anyway, yeah, the cables are doing good. Buy more cables.

[Dan]

They're Good.

[Linus]

Good job, Creative warehouse team. Okay, what else we got going on today?

[Luke]

It shows it in centimeters and feet because I think I saw a condition Canadian flag, so I was like, maybe shows 10 centimeters.

[Linus]

I don't know, man. I don't expect people to read the product page for everything they buy.

[Luke]

I mean, it's not a product page. It's the name of the product. Okay, I'm not trying to chirp our own audience, but like, you literally select on a drop down. It's. It's literally. It's literally. This is like the product page. Like, it's.

[Linus]

Anyways, we appreciate your business.

[Luke]

Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

[Linus]

All right, why don't we jump right into. Discord banned thousands of users for posting pictures of chessboards and Minecraft screenshots. Since May, Discord's automated safety system has wrongly banned thousands of users for posting harmless images, including Minecraft inventories, spreadsheets, game textures, even just plain transparent backgrounds. Some users got hit with permanent bans, citing child safety violations for posting Minecraft screenshots. The issue finally blew up after roughly 200 people were banned in a single weekend. Discord CTO, after they investigated, confirmed that it was apparently two stacked bugs. A single faulty hash in their content matching database would wrongly flag grid patterns as known harmful material. And the system then skipped the human review that is supposed to happen before any action takes place, going straight to permanent bans. A second bug kept the bans locked in even after staff cleared the accounts. Discord said that everyone affected has been unbanned and the bad hash has been fixed. Our discussion question says a false child sexual abuse material flag is just about the worst thing that you can attach to someone's account by mistake. Should permanent bans even be possible without a human actually looking first? Oh, man, I see.

[Luke]

Discord scale, bro. When almost every user is unpaid. Bro, Bro.

[Linus]

And who wants to review those, man? Yeah, like, I can understand that, too.

[Luke]

God, I didn't even think about that part.

[Linus]

Like, there's a reason that we're just using hashes so that it's no one's job to review this stuff all day. Like, that's. And there's. Man, there's no excuse either for banning people's accounts and labeling them child predators when. Okay, then they didn't do anything.

[Luke]

But I'm going to address that a little bit because this thing said the worst thing you can attach to their account. I don't think it tells every other user.

[Linus]

I don't know. I feel like I don't think so. The principal's office has got to have a permanent record somewhere.

[Luke]

Yeah, but.

[Linus]

No, I know, I know. Yeah, but just like, I don't know, Like, I'd feel. I feel they're not.

[Luke]

They're not putting you on a registry or anything.

[Linus]

I'd feel deeply. Well, I don't know which governments they're cooperating with, actually.

[Luke]

I'm in a publicly accessible registry.

[Linus]

Any registry. I don't want to be on any registry for that.

[Luke]

I would love to go to court and then pull up the offensive imagery. And it's just a bunch of, like, chess screenshots that I'm sending Emma.

[Linus]

Okay. I'm going to tell you, though, the problem with that is that it's far easier for people to make things up about you and damage your reputation than it is for your eventual day in court to absolve you.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

You will never reach all those people again. So.

[Dan]

Totally.

[Luke]

So it would still be still bad, obviously. Really bad.

[Linus]

Still bad.

[Luke]

There's a. Chess.com has a thing right now where if you beat the current bots, you get custom chess pieces. And there was a forest one and it makes your knights bears. And I was very happy about it. I sent screenshots to, like, a lot of people, but I didn't get banned.

[Linus]

Okay, well, that's lucky. It's a good thing those bears weren't bear.

[Luke]

Well, they weren't cubs.

[Linus]

Yeah, but they just don't live that long, so even an adult bear could be well under 18.

[Dan]

It's feeling gross now.

[Linus]

Bears live 10 to 25 years, according to AI.

[Dan]

Oh, wow.

[Linus]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Dan]

Most of the ones I know are like 50.

[Linus]

I couldn't pass it up.

[Luke]

Oh, he's gonna ding it.

[Dan]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Luke]

Nice.

[Dan]

Nice.

[Linus]

Thanks for bearing with me. I had to go do that.

[Luke]

Oh, very good. GOG Joint CEO has a point to bear. He said the future of gaming shouldn't come at the expense of ownership. An interview with Eurogamer Responding to Sony's decision to end disc production, GOG Joint CEO. Kristoff Peplinsky sure said, as the industry becomes increasingly digital, players should have the full confidence that the games they buy will remain accessible regardless of changes to platform, storefronts or business models. Sick. He repeated that GOG games are DRM free and come with offline installers, giving people lasting control over their purchases. Even if a game vanishes from the GOG storefront, it never leaves your library. Which is a stark contrast to Sony's plans to remove hundreds of Films from customers, digital libraries without compensation. The result of failing to renew licensing with Studio Canal, which is just up to them to decide if it doesn't feel like it's properly profitable anymore or not and is not part of a choice that you're able to make. Which blows. They're doing something. So I'm just going to keep going. Valve released Windows drivers for Steam hardware, but won't support it. Apparently they released a Steam hardware Windows resources page providing drivers for Steam hardware. The resources are offered as is and Valve says it will not support Windows on Steam hardware. They direct users to Steam OS recovery instructions instead. Just in case you did have a problem with your Windows stuff. Dual boot on SteamOS is not yet available on Steam OS.

[Linus]

Oh, wait. Hey, hold on. You moved on from the GOG topic already? Yeah, well, no, I wanted to go shopping.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

It was all.

[Luke]

How did that.

[Linus]

How did this not end up in the thing? I. What do you mean? Yeah, where is it?

[Luke]

Oh, you had notes that.

[Linus]

Okay, yeah, hold on. Where's.

[Luke]

You want to go shopping at gog?

[Linus]

Yeah, I want to go shopping on there gog. I. I want to see.

[Luke]

Need to be in there. Just go to gog.

[Linus]

Well, yeah, but I forgot because if it was in the topic, then you would have known that you were supposed to go shopping and you wouldn't have moved on.

[Luke]

That's true.

[Linus]

Okay. Yeah. Pay attention. I was talking to Dan. Relax. I pay attention. Sort of. Oh my God. Did we crash gog? Did we just love hug them? Because it's not loading. Is it loading for you?

[Luke]

Working for me, yeah.

[Dan]

Oh, that's weird.

[Linus]

What's my computer doing? Oh, there we go. All right, nice. So basically the. The segment is simple. Luke and I are each gonna just go on GOG and find a game that we really like that you can get on gog.

[Luke]

Got it.

[Linus]

With no. With no drm and you just actually own it forever. Like, GOG is so cool. When you download the game, you just get like a file. It's like, this is the game. Okay, well, Luke found his and he's gonna talk about it. Well, I should stop. Okay, hold on. Which one is that? Okay, that is actually a really. Is that $3.60 Canadian, bro?

[Luke]

This is actually a great deal.

[Linus]

That's a great deal.

[Luke]

That's a game. It still holds up. It's still really fun. I would genuinely actually really recommend you go pick this up. It's really cool that they show it's the lowest price on the last 30 days before discount.

[Linus]

I might have Picked that.

[Dan]

If I'd seen.

[Luke]

It's like I. I kind of picked it as a meme. And the more I thought about it, it's like, that's an incredible deal. Game of the Year edition. Tomb Raider $3.59.

[Linus]

Almost as good as this version of

[Luke]

Tomb Raider $3.59 Canadian, which is going to be. Yeah, Noki says $3 USD. Like, just go crazy. Go buy this.

[Linus]

Go buy it.

[Luke]

If you haven't played this before, just go get it.

[Linus]

It's really, really get it on. Really good.

[Luke]

That is wicked.

[Linus]

It's one of the only games that I played all the way through during the years of, like, starting LMG and having young children.

[Luke]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also played it the whole way and it's. It's very good. It's a genuinely just really good game.

[Linus]

Okay, let me. Let me have a look here. What else, man?

[Dan]

You.

[Linus]

You found yours so fast.

[Luke]

I did.

[Linus]

Okay. I'm going to Summersale Encore here. Okay, what else we got? You know what? I'm gonna see if they have, man. Some of these are pretty obscure and not the Claire kind, the kind that nobody heard of. What the heck is Glazzo? It's a dollar.

[Luke]

I like that. That was a real ding, but it was short. I think that was very.

[Dan]

I'm trying to. I'm trying to work on the, like, palette of dings that are available. Yeah.

[Linus]

All right, well, why don't you finish that topic while I find something that, that I want to recommend to people, hopefully for a good price.

[Luke]

Hitman absolution for $2.50 is also actually pretty sick. Yeah. It seems like all the Hitman games are on, like, steep discount. All the older Hitman games.

[Linus]

A dollar 35 for Hitman blood money.

[Luke]

Yeah. Absolution for 250. These are again, Canadian. Yeah, these are. These are older Hitman games. Like, the graphics a little rough, but if you go to Absolution, Absolutions, not that old. Much more. Much more up to date. So that's why I was kind of recommending Absolution.

[Dan]

Right.

[Luke]

Yeah, that's pretty. That's pretty sick.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Oh, dude, I. Okay, man. It's not as. It's definitely not as good of a deal as Tomb Raider 2016 for $3 or whatever that $4 or whatever that price was. But I absolutely loved Dragon Age origins and it's 27 Canadian dollars. That's like 20 bucks.

[Luke]

Dragon Age Origins is a fantastic game

[Linus]

and you, like, own it forever now and no one can ever take it away from you, which is. Might be important because if you're like me, then you might put like a hundred, 200 hours into a character. Yeah. Super awesome game. Really enjoyed the heck out of it. It's a little more casual compared to like, you know, Neverwinter Nights to like some of the. Some of the older sort of DND Boom. Or origin games. But yeah, it's. It's a really enjoyable game.

[Luke]

Boom.

[Linus]

Deus Ex Mankind Divided. I never played Mankind Divided. Is it good?

[Luke]

Good game. I liked it. And like, graphics like, I know we're looking at some of these games are a bit older. Graphics on this are still gonna be pretty good.

[Linus]

So. Fun fact.

[Luke]

Yeah. I Dan said it's okay. I'm not like overwhelmingly positive about this game, but I remember it, enjoying it at least for a while.

[Linus]

The only Deus Ex game I ever played was Deus Hex Invisible War, which apparently is the worst.

[Dan]

Better than that.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Dan]

So is getting punched.

[Linus]

I enjoyed the crap out of it. I played this all the way through. I don't. I. Look, I.

[Dan]

But then you're only looking up if you had started with the first one and then you're gonna play Mankind Divided. This is kind of not as good.

[Linus]

I don't know, man.

[Dan]

You're gonna love Mankind Divided. That game's awesome.

[Linus]

I don't know what to say.

[Dan]

I.

[Luke]

So long ago that I had kind of like.

[Dan]

Yeah. I mean, it's like playing System Shock. It's like I am too used to modern convenience. Yeah. I don't want to play a calculator.

[Linus]

I tried to play system shock 2 or I tried to play one of the System Shock games after playing BioShock because like the reviews of BioShock were like, oh, yeah, it's just like it's dumbed down, ripped off System Shock. Blah, blah, blah. If you're a real gamer, you System Shock. And so I was like. I mean, I like. I like games. I'll play a real game. And I tried play System Shock. I was like, okay, I'm out. I maybe I like. Maybe I like friendly normie games. I enjoyed the heck out of BioShock,

[Dan]

you're my mommy or Memo, something like that. I don't know. Yeah, that game's hard to like in modern day. There's some mods that make it better.

[Linus]

Whatever. I enjoyed Deus Ex Invisible War. I got it for free with like a GPU purchase or something. Remember, GPU's coming with games.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And like multiple games. That was cool. Anyway, GOG Games, Unlimited games All the games, Gog, go find a cool game. You'll have spent. You'll have spent US$25 and you could have Tomb Raider and Dragon Age Origins and that'll keep you busy for like the next month or two. And you will own those games forever. It's pretty sick.

[Luke]

It is fascinating to me how many. How many Gooner games there are and how well they sell. It is constantly fascinating to me. I have all the filters turned off on Steam because, like, I don't want to be bothered by the. Like, are you this old? Like, I've had my account long enough. Literally, I've had my account long enough that you should know that I am old enough to see whatever I want. But then it also shows up in the recommendations. I'm sure there's some way I could tune it, but it's always under, like top selling. Right now there's some Gunar game and we jump over to Gog Bestseller. Very top new releases. Very top.

[Linus]

Oh, there's a new one. There's a new. It's okay, Succubus. Sorry, I can't read it from here. I was. I was trying to pretend I knew what it was.

[Dan]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke]

Anyways, next. Next topic, I guess.

[Linus]

Yeah, trying to. I'm trying to find that which Raymond game I like played hours and hours and hours of on PC. Was it like. Was it like the first one? What? What? Yeah, there's a bunch of Rayman games on on gog. Anyway, sorry, I'm. Oh, dude, they have the. They have the Batman games. How much is Arkham Asylum?

[Luke]

Yeah, apparently I can tune my settings to. Okay, so there's a setting to show not safe for work content and separate setting to hide games that are explicitly not safe for work. So it would show the Witcher, but it won't put Gunner games in your feed. So I guess I need to go tune that.

[Linus]

Arkham asylum might be 15 bucks US, which is probably.

[Luke]

That's probably pretty good.

[Linus]

Not. I maybe try to see if you could catch it on sale, but you can always wish list it. Arkham Asylum. So good. I love Arkham Asylum. The other ones just felt like kind of more Arkham Asylum. So I didn't. I didn't really find myself getting that into them, but yeah, Arkham Asylum was awesome. And like. Oh.

[Dan]

Oh, man.

[Linus]

Mark Hamill is the Joker. Oh, he's just so good. Oh, he's just so good.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus]

What a performance. All right, what do you want to talk about next? Oh, wait, did you ever actually finish the valve driver? Yeah, whatever. They don't. They have Windows driver's not supporting it. They're not supporting it that much.

[Luke]

Doesn't support dual boot thing is definitely not an operating system little thing. That's a machine system. Don't worry about that. You can now use your Sony headphones as free real time head tracker. Interesting. For race and flight simulators, developer Nicholas Slattery released Sony Head Tracker free open source Windows app that taps into the spatial audio. Oh, that makes sense. The spatial audio motion sensors already inside the Sony headphones like the insert model number here and XM6 and turns them into real time head trackers. It reads the gyroscope data Windows normally ignores and feeds it to Open Track, which works with over 200 PC games including Microsoft Flight Simulator, Assetto, Corsa and elite dangerous. The XM4 and older won't work because they lack the sensors. And AirPods are out because Apple locks head tracking behind its proprietary protocol. That's pretty cool. That's actually like that could be a

[Linus]

compelling reason to just abandon my AirPods. If anyone else could get the ergonomics right for me. But then I, I, I was expecting my Pro Threes to eventually like be comfortable for me. They still aren't. The Pro twos fit me better, so I might be looking for an alternative anyway because I don't think I can stick with these forever. So as, as can you competitors.

[Luke]

You can't buy threes.

[Linus]

No, I could go back to Pro. I could go back to my Pro Twos. I literally still have them. But the battery life is not that great anymore because they're older now and, and also you can buy new ones though, as competitors, you know, make better products with better active noise cancellation, whatever. The Pro 2s are going to fall behind.

[Luke]

Yeah, fair enough.

[Linus]

And so I'd be looking for if I were to move on from the Pro 3s, which I tolerate, they're comfortable enough. I'd be looking for, I'd be looking wider, I'd be casting a wider net.

[Luke]

Yep, the next topic. I have a bone to pick with me, with the world.

[Linus]

Okay, maybe you. What did I do?

[Luke]

You responded being like, oh, I guess we're just boomers. I don't agree.

[Linus]

What? What are you talking about?

[Luke]

Go to the next topic.

[Linus]

Oh, okay. So last week I complained that there was no way, or at least no easy way. I think I did kind of disclaim it to sort your Steam library by date added in the desktop interface. I showed that I had found it in the big picture mode interface. But not here. And so I was like, well, we've got our filters. We've got sort by recent activity. We've got ready to play games. How the heck do I sort these by whatever. So you could sort them by when you played them, but where the heck is when I bought them. It turns out that it's here.

[Luke]

Which is exactly why I don't agree. It's not there.

[Linus]

I thought someone sent me a screenshot.

[Luke]

They sure did.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke]

No. Let's see how long it takes you two to figure this out. I was gonna help, and now I'm more interested in not. Oh, yeah, because I know where it's that.

[Linus]

Hold on, hold on. Manage. Can I. Yeah. Can I sort. No.

[Dan]

Okay. I don't have. I don't have Steam on this computer. I think I know what button it is. I'll keep it in my brain. Hold on.

[Linus]

Library. Okay, I'm gonna try.

[Luke]

The person in the tweet said to click the home button. So you could click the home button under Library.

[Linus]

Cog. No, sorry. Home button.

[Luke]

Yeah, under Library. They said to click the home button under. Under library.

[Linus]

Oh,

[Luke]

Yep. So that didn't do anything.

[Linus]

Collections. Create a new collect.

[Luke]

No, no. Do you want to see it?

[Linus]

Hold on. No, no, not yet.

[Dan]

All right.

[Linus]

No. Okay. All right, fine. Show it to me. It's not.

[Dan]

It's this.

[Linus]

Wait, wait, wait. Hold on, hold on. Don't know. No, don't show me yet. All games. Hold on. Here we go. Here we go. There it is. Data added to library. Okay. I knew I was going to find it.

[Dan]

Wait, what's all that stuff on top of? Like, I don't.

[Luke]

This is what's new.

[Dan]

Is that new? No, I don't have those shelves on mine.

[Luke]

Recent games in play next.

[Dan]

At least at home.

[Luke]

Yeah, they're on mine at home and on this computer here.

[Dan]

Interesting.

[Linus]

I just collapsed.

[Dan]

I just have my all games, so that's something.

[Luke]

How did you even collapse them?

[Linus]

I'm not sure what I just did.

[Dan]

I. Anyway, so I think these guys are. Boom.

[Linus]

So the reason Luke is the reason

[Dan]

back in my day, Steam was green. I know I can't do any of this.

[Linus]

We should probably give them the context for that. I responded on Twitter saying, oh, I guess we just had a boomer moment not being able to find it. But you know what? That's not a great introduction.

[Luke]

It's below the fold. Yeah, it's okay. My main thing is where I'm looking for it is up here.

[Linus]

Yeah, that's where I sort. That's where My games are.

[Luke]

Yes. I want it as like either a filter here or an option on one of these or something like that.

[Linus]

If I wanted to view all my games as giant bug box art, then I would be in big picture mode where I do know how to find it. Yeah. Going all the way down there is.

[Luke]

And then clicking this thing and then going down here.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah. Just give me a better sword over on the left and then I think everyone's happy.

[Luke]

Yeah. So I don't. I don't. It's. It's below the fold and it's in a weird spot. You can reorder the shelves. Sure.

[Linus]

Yeah. But I.

[Luke]

By default it's below the fold.

[Linus]

Yeah, default behavior matters. Like I remember back when I used to do more like Android phone reviews, I'd have people.

[Luke]

That's so cool. I didn't know this was a thing.

[Linus]

Someone make like a noki linked Steam brew.

[Luke]

Old Steam.

[Linus]

Yes. That's cute.

[Luke]

This looks so sick. Actually.

[Dan]

The buttons.

[Linus]

I remember the buttons back when I did a lot of like Android phone reviews. I'd take a bunch of flack for evaluating them. The way that they come out of the box and using the default settings or type of navigation or the default keyboard or whatever. Why are you not just immediately downloading a custom launcher? And why are you not immediately rooting it and getting the most out of it? It's like, dude, I'm not trying to make your favorite Android phone maker look bad or anything, but these are things that most people are not going to change. So these are things that are important. Default behavior does matter is pretty much all I'm trying to say here. So what do you. What is this exactly?

[Luke]

Old Steam.

[Linus]

Yeah, but what is it?

[Luke]

Infinite Hiatus, though.

[Linus]

I don't know. Oh, infinite. Not indefinite. Yeah.

[Luke]

Oh, infinite hiatus.

[Linus]

The glory days of the skin are behind it.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

This might not be a thing.

[Linus]

All right.

[Dan]

Bummer.

[Linus]

That's cool though. Yeah, it's a cool little project.

[Luke]

Looks sweet. I miss fun UIs like that. I find a lot of UIs these days are very, very, very boring. We had a conversation on Wench a while ago. There's that like, you know, websites from 2006 thing and they're all so much more unique looking and like even just looking from one to the other, they all look very, very unique. And these days, like every web store looks the same, every info website looks the same, every wiki for every game looks the same.

[Dan]

The.

[Luke]

This is so cool. It's so cool. And with the power of modern like CSS and stuff. Like, my God, you could do so much.

[Linus]

I mean, you could run Half Life 2 in your browser.

[Luke]

Yeah. Like the things you can do with browsers these days are amazing. And it. Yeah. And the problem is I don't even blame, I don't blame the developers, I don't blame the managers. I'm not blaming the companies. And it's. People are following like user behavioral data. People are making the things that the people ultimately maybe not say they want, but their actions indicate that they want. It just, it is what it is. You guys are born because they need to work on desktop and mobile, desktop and mobile and tons of different versions of everything in between. That's a big part of the problem.

[Linus]

And what's this? Is this desktop or mobile? Because I can sure move it. Well, no, it matters. It matters. It's a way smaller screen than what I would expect someone to be using on a desktop. Yeah. Experiences are different from device to device, even if they're like the same version. And I think it's a legitimate question. And some of them are going to have touchscreens, some of them won't. I wasn't, I wasn't even kind of

[Luke]

needs to be pretty okay at supporting. I wasn't trolling things. Yeah, there's, there's a lot, there's a lot of reasons why modern websites are honestly really boring. And I don't know if we're going to be able to get away from it, to be honest.

[Linus]

You know what else we're not going to be able to get away from? LTT Labs publishing some banger articles recently. Dude, this is so cool.

[Luke]

This one did super well actually.

[Linus]

Ryzen AI Halo is AMD's new little AI dev kit that's meant to take on the DGX spark from Nvidia. And I'd say to a lesser degree like the Mac Studio. The hardware is not necessarily as competitive with something like a Mac Studio. There's just not enough bandwidth. But in terms of the pricing, especially compared to what the Mac Studio costs now and in terms of the software that's included to make it just brain dead simple to get up and running with local LLMs, it's a pretty cool little piece of kit. So I read through all this, enjoyed the heck out of it earlier this week. And there's another fresh treat for me to enjoy because I actually just made my way through LLM Quantization part one. Cause there's some pretty, there's some reasonably thick. Go watch this and also go read this and then Come back reference material from it. So it took me a little while to remember. Oh yeah, I haven't finished like doing all of my homework and reading that article. So I actually just finished part one recently. And here we go. Quantization part two is up. So if you guys don't know LTT labs.com doing some actually really amazing content. They also have companion articles for some of our videos. Here's the short circuit. They did a little bit more sort of performance benchmarking for the Labs article because we were in a real hurry to get that thing unboxed and published. And then we ultimately sat on it after it was done editing. It was a whole thing. Anyway, don't worry about it. The point is Labs team can take their time. They did, they did some testing. Oh my God, the battery life sucks. I mean, I wasn't expecting it to be great, but what the heck. Oh man. All right. I mean, yeah, Bright display though, so that's. That's something cool. It's just pyrite. Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's.

[Luke]

Check out these.

[Linus]

That's a fair thing to say.

[Luke]

So look, look at that one that's

[Linus]

going on right now.

[Luke]

And then swipe to the right to see the second one and zoom into the bottom left hand corner to see where it, where it all came.

[Linus]

Came from.

[Luke]

But those stats are for. I'm going to publish those. But those stats are for that AI Ryzen box thing. The Ryzen AI Halo Dev kit. It's very interesting to me what's getting views because the Lab site has been having fun with articles. We recognized. We heard you. You know, okay, product page, product review, nobody cares. All right, understood. So we've been working on articles. Articles have been more fun anyways and it's been really, really interesting seeing stuff that people are interested in. And it seems pretty random sometimes. Like There was a 45 watt power brick from a bit ago that just banged. People loved that for some reason. We didn't get crazy viewership on it. But the sentiment around the. Does. Does the Belkin cable charge the Nintendo Switch 2 faster? Just. Even though it's like Nintendo branded thing. The sentiment around this was, was really positive and fun to read. But yeah, there's. You release an article on that AI Ryzen box and people do be clicking on it and staying and reading and coming from different parts of the Internet. But it's, it's, it's fun. And I saw some negative stuff because it's, it's talking about AI in general, which is fair enough. But I think basically anything that is going to progress the ability for people to run things locally instead of just funneling all of their money into these big companies stealing everything from everyone is, is better than the alternative. So I'm pretty down with it personally.

[Linus]

Hey, speaking of which, Midjourney is trying to flip the script in the copyright lawsuits. That lawsuit that has been brought against them by Disney, Universal and Warner Brothers, who sued last year over their AI generating images of characters like Bart Simpson, Darth Vader, Superman and Batman in a new motion. Whoops. Midjourney is asking the court to force these studios to reveal how much they use AI behind closed doors, including AI business plans, training data sets, model weights, and even board presentations about AI strategy. Midjourney argues that if the studios are internally training image generating AI on unlicensed copyrighted data for things like storyboarding, then that proves that it's industry custom to do exactly what these studios are suing Midjourney for. A magistrate judge already ruled in June that the studios only have to disclose AI use in consumer facing content, and Midjourney is now asking the district judge to overturn that limit, arguing that it lets the studios cherry pick documents that support their case while hiding the ones that don't. Midjourney also wants every prompt that studio employees have ever typed into Midjourney itself along with the outputs. The stakes are massive on both ends. The studios are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work, which across potentially millions of images, could be a company ending number for Midjourney. And the studio's attorneys are calling this discovery push a fishing expedition, insisting they aren't trying to stop AI or shut Midjourney down, just stop it from reproducing their characters as the first major Hollywood versus AI case. Whatever precedent gets set here is going to ripple across dozens of similar lawsuits pending against OpenAI, anthropic stability and others. Our discussion question is if it comes out that the studios are training their own AI on unlicensed content while suing Mid Journey for the same thing, does that actually change whether Mid Journey was right or not? Or does it just mean that both are wrong? This will be a short discussion.

[Luke]

Just both are wrong. Just definitely both are wrong. The amount of like, yeah, the amount of theft involved with AI stuff is mind blowing and they are wrong for it. And we'll see how that goes. Yeah, I don't have a ton to add. It feels like a very, like, I don't remember what all the letters in the acronym mean, but it feels Like a very accelerationist mindset to be like, we'll just do all the stealing and potentially get our entire company burned. But as long as this thing happens, then we're fine with it. Which is like. I actually guarantee you there are people that think like that.

[Linus]

Oh yeah. So like 100%.

[Luke]

Yep.

[Linus]

I, like, I. It can be comforting to tell ourselves surely nobody could be that stupid. Is probably a bot account. But I mean I, I hesitate to bring this up again.

[Luke]

Oh no, you could not. I don't know what it is, but you could not.

[Linus]

Yeah, feels too late.

[Luke]

It totally isn't.

[Linus]

But I'm reminded of that conversation about Tesla with the finance bro.

[Luke]

Oh, oh, yeah, sure, whatever.

[Linus]

Well, no, like, oh, has it gotten back? Someone in my life watches WAN show and knows the person whose birthday party that was and referred them to the section and they asked me about it. They were like, you mean name, right? I'm like, Anyway. But that was like meeting. That was like meeting. Some of the things that they said sounded like the kind of thing that if I wanted to self soothe I would tell myself, yeah, but it's probably a bot. If I was interacting with this person. Person online. Like the, it's, it's like that park ranger quote, you know, where the, the line between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans is. Is not a line, it's more of an overlap. And I feel like we've, we've, we're well past that. Where the line between the most obnoxious or, or dumbest humans and the smartest AI chatbots is like this, you know, like there's a thick, thick overlap with a couple of Cs.

[Luke]

Yeah, this is, this is what I was talking about.

[Linus]

Effective accelerationism.

[Luke]

E ACC And I thought every letter might stand for something, but no, it's just nice.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Like those kind of people are going to be fine. Well, you know, I mean they're probably walking away with it with tons of money anyways. If the company goes down, it doesn't mean their personal bank accounts go down.

[Linus]

Yeah, that's the whole thing when you just like raise capital.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And then it doesn't work out. It's like you still got paid. For what? For the work you were doing.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And like you should, like that's the whole point of raising capital is that you can afford to be paid to work like you can. Your value can be appreciated in monetary terms while you work on something that presumably is important enough that somebody gave you money to work on it. But that's fine.

[Luke]

You're seeing a lot of the stuff where one of these companies go down and all the people are just like immediately scattered to other companies. So like if Mid Journey goes down it does not mean that there will not be another image generation company and

[Linus]

it does not mean that any of the theft that Mid Journey engaged in never happened.

[Luke]

And now that's been filled out to other ones as well. So like a lot of it, I think a lot of the plan legitimately was to make it so that this thing is just on rails and you're not going to stop it.

[Linus]

Tim. Tim.000x3 says so are you saying that AI has reached human level intelligence? A low bar but I agree. No, I'm not saying that AI has intelligence. I'm saying that in terms of like quality of engagement through text on the Internet or like like how do I. Or like like good takes versus bad takes. Like like just knowing what to say next. I can't tell the difference between in terms of like the quality of the statement of a, of a very cutting edge bot versus a very not as cutting edge human brain. But however that human brain can do so many things that a chatbot can't do today and looks like is a complete dead end for at least the modern paradigm. The modern LLM paradigm. That's what I'll say. What else we want to talk about today? Oh, Sony's being sued for nearly half a billion dollars by a Dutch nonprofit after they announced that PlayStation discs are done in 2028. I man, I don't know how that's going to work. Yeah, I don't know what. Well, okay, here we go. Let's, let's get through it. Let's get through it. Okay, so Sony's facing a lawsuit in the Netherlands claiming that Sony's push towards an all digital PlayStation ecosystem would give it too much control over game pricing and hurt consumers. The lawsuit argues that ending discs in 2028 would eliminate the used game market and leave players with no real alternative to buying through the PlayStation Store, giving Sony effective control over prices. Yeah, that sounds about right.

[Luke]

I'll suspect they did it now because their current console is fairly old and they don't want this to be a news cycle around their new console.

[Linus]

That's right. The Dutch consumer group says that removing physical media and resale options would reduce consumer choice. Weakened competition could ultimately mean higher prices for PlayStation users. I had. There's a disc in our discussion questions is what apparently someone put down as a Linus made question.

[Dan]

Sure.

[Linus]

Could Sony solve this by just putting an ironclad clause in their terms of service that gives digital asset owners the same rights as physical asset owners. If they did that, would this whole conversation just completely go away?

[Luke]

I mean, the conversation about them being big, mean guys might go away, but their whole money situation will get astronomically worse. We've talked about this before. The ability to pass around digital games is not equivalent to the ability to pass around physical games. They are completely different beasts. If everyone on the Internet can just hand around digital games, the barrier of entry, of doing that is so low that it will actually have a notable impact on game developers. Whether you're okay with that or not is not the conversation we're having. To be clear, the conversation we're having is just pointing out that that is a wildly different beast.

[Linus]

What if, what if. Okay, hear me out. What if you couldn't lend games, but they allowed you to sell them?

[Luke]

Same problem.

[Dan]

And.

[Linus]

Hold on, hold on. I'm going somewhere with this. And the game developer gets a cut. Maybe not a full. Maybe not. Not the cut of a full game,

[Luke]

but they get 10% still just reducing their revenue. But that is interesting because that's kind of like the. Does that, does that marketplace.

[Linus]

Yeah. Does that. Does that blunt it a little bit? Does that, does that, does that make you less angry? Does that make. Does that make game developers maybe more open to this? Could we get. Could we, could we reach a compromise that everyone's unhappy with?

[Luke]

I have no idea. To be honest. I can't. I can't posture as a game developer. I think I would also have a very different tune depending on what type of game developer I was. Am I a big triple A game developer? Am I a little indie game developer? If I made Mecha Chameleon, do I care if I made Mecha Chameleon? Maybe I would actually prefer that it worked that way because then maybe at least there wouldn't be more. More people playing knockoffs on Roblox of my game than there are people playing my game on Steam. So maybe that would actually make me happier. Not sure.

[Linus]

This is one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes lines.

[Luke]

Tangential news. Years of Chinese court rulings on inherited game accounts and in game items are now only. Are only now gaining attention in the west after Reddit user slower. Something shared translated case summaries with help from his wife, a Chinese lawyer and certified translator. One old ruling involved a valuable sword from an MMO that after its owner died, was ruled to have real economic value and should be sold with the proceeds split 15:50.50 between the deceased legal wife and his in game wife.

[Linus]

What?

[Luke]

Since both contributed to owning it. Oh, no. I didn't think it was going that way.

[Linus]

Dan, get that toucan out of here.

[Dan]

Whoa.

[Linus]

I cannot anymore. That was the line.

[Luke]

I've heard of work wives and work husbands, and I thought that crap was ridiculous.

[Linus]

And then we had wow weddings.

[Luke]

Yeah. We also had wow Mounts. You know what that story is that

[Linus]

just sex in wow.

[Luke]

There was.

[Dan]

I think that's the wife.

[Luke]

There was a lady in Burning Crusade when flying mounts were introduced. Flying mounts? Epic flying was incredibly expensive. And she wanted an epic flying mount. And she was like, well, you can mount me if you get me. If you give me the gold to buy an epic flying mount. It's a. It's an old Craigslist post. As far as my understanding goes, it was completely real. It's like legendary.

[Dan]

Oh, I was joking. Oh, my God.

[Luke]

No, this is. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is real. I'm actually pretty sure it was real. I mean.

[Linus]

Okay, here. Hear me out. Hear me out. Is it really any more selling your body than if you did a bunch of, like, backbreaking labor for the wow. Gold to buy an epic flying mount?

[Dan]

I sell my body to Linus, and then I can go home and play WoW by myself. We all do that. There is prostitution under capitalism is what we all do.

[Linus]

You know, I'm gonna do this.

[Luke]

There we go.

[Dan]

Yeah, that. That'll teach you.

[Linus]

Hello. I need 5,000 world of gold. Okay. For my epic flying mount. In return, you can mount me. If you have an account on the Laughing Skull server. And I want the 5000. Before we do anything, we can make the trade at your place. Since I can't host because I'm having a lot of dumb guys message me who clearly don't have the gold. Make sure you send a picture of yourself and a screenshot of your character with the photo.

[Dan]

5000 Gold.

[Linus]

I will be checking Armory profiles.

[Dan]

Thanks.

[Linus]

I play a level 70 night elf. Druid would prefer someone who's into role playing. I have a costume. Anyone will do as long as you have the gold. I would also be okay with a woman too. As long as you have the gold. Also, not averse to the idea of group and anal. Please send a pic and be real and drug and disease free. With 5,000 gold on the Laughing Skull server, it is not okay to contact them about other commercial interests.

[Luke]

Yep.

[Linus]

Oh, okay.

[Luke]

See, when I. When I turned 16.

[Linus]

Yeah, some.

[Luke]

Some.

[Linus]

Did you have 5,000 gold?

[Luke]

The super Rich kids would get a car.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

My dad got me an epic flying mount, and I. I didn't even have to sell my body on Craigslist. Really?

[Linus]

How much was an epic flying mount? It's. It's a little. I mean, don't take this because your family didn't have a ton of money, but was she for, like, not very much?

[Luke]

Not her. Not her. He bought. He actually bought me an in game. He bought me gold in game for my brother and I and bought us both.

[Linus]

Oh, so he didn't like. No, buy it. So. So sorry, when was this? How much money was it? Gold.

[Luke]

Gold.

[Linus]

No, no, I know, I know. But what was 5,000 gold in real money?

[Luke]

Oh, back then? I have no idea.

[Linus]

Well, I guess what I'm trying to

[Luke]

ask is, like, that would have been 2006. Okay, so I think 2006.

[Linus]

What was 5,000 gold worth in real USD in 2006? Like, no, no. Wow. Gold.

[Luke]

So it would have been 2007. Sorry, 2007.

[Linus]

Like,

[Luke]

I don't. I don't know. I don't know if gold buying was. I'm sure it was a thing, I guess, but I don't know.

[Linus]

AI overview. Okay, hold on, hold on. Memory insufficient. That sounds like a pretty geeky website. Okay, do we have us? Oh, good lord. Hold on. Us. Can I. Okay, give me. Give me US Dollars. Okay, now, you know what? Let's go. Let's go. Dollar sign. Okay, give me a dollar sign. Two factor authentication. Blah, blah, blah. Maintenance costs were something, something. Seven per year. Okay. Not tradables. Okay. I don't think we're gonna find it here. Wow to USD. Wow to USD. Converter and calculator all. Okay, here we go.

[Luke]

Converter, calculator.

[Linus]

Oh. Oh, this is just some stupid crypto thing, for crying out loud. You know what? I'm just gonna go with the AI answer. It may not be the right answer, but early in 2007, gold sold for about 50, $200 per thousand gold. So wait, we're talking like 250 to

[Luke]

$500 and then inflation. It's been a while.

[Linus]

Is that. Is that a good price for paid relations? I have no idea. No context for this.

[Luke]

I've been the wrong person, brother.

[Linus]

I was walking up the. The. I was walking up the Vegas strip with someone who was a troll, who I'm not going to name, but you probably know who they are. And to embarrass me because I was very shy and like, not, you know, worldly, so to speak. This was. This was earlier on before they had kind of made Vegas a little bit more kid friendly. So this is.

[Luke]

Yeah, it was not when we first

[Linus]

started going in my early days of NCIX and just to embarrass me, they yelled at, yelled out very loud like how much is it, you know, sexual act.

[Luke]

Was there a response?

[Linus]

It was less than I thought. So that was interesting to know. Hasn't come up again since then. But you know, hey, my luck could change. So good to know. Anyways, Luke and Linus, are you to each other's in game wives or who would come to mind as your in game wife? Who's your in game wife? Luke?

[Luke]

A lot of my gaming these days is solo. So maybe I'm just, you know, maybe I'm. Yeah, exactly. I was trying to think of how to even call that but Leftina or Rochelle. Yeah, maybe I'm one of those.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus]

Our other discussion question for this topic was if LMG started a physical media library and allowed staff to use it, do you think that would go over well? It's actually something that I have talked about before because it came up that it would be pretty convenient to have like an LMG plex for times when we're just like making content and we want to put on some piece of media and it's very inconvenient to go get a Blu Ray. And if we just had like, like kind of like remember when the US dollar used to be backed by the gold standard? If we had like our plex server was backed by the blue standard. So as long as there's a Blu ray and as long as only one person's watching it at once, then you know, you know, whatever. And so I did actually kick the idea around of having like an on prem vault of Blu Rays. You would, you would throw away all the packaging, throw away all the like art and everything. People internally take it, I don't care. But so you basically just have towers and towers of disks for your like because theoretically as long as they're working at the office regularly, they have to come here every day. They could conceivably go get the disc and could conceivably go take it home. So what's the difference? In fact, I think we've even talked about this on wan show before.

[Luke]

I think maybe and I think we

[Linus]

came to the conclusion that it's, it's closer but it's not quite the barrier that that physical media is and therefore probably still piracy.

[Luke]

See, even that doesn't do it. I was gonna say what if you had to like go take the Blu Ray and put it on your desk before you left work.

[Linus]

Yeah, I mean but you can't force

[Luke]

that, you can't enforce it.

[Linus]

Honor system, right?

[Luke]

Still not the barrier because Blu Ray players are gonna become a problem. Honestly, I, I don't remember if I talked this about this. I don't remember if I talked about this on WAN or if I talked about this to. To Emma.

[Linus]

I've never owned one.

[Luke]

Well, yeah, I guess you just. Yeah, fair enough.

[Linus]

What's. Well, I have a drive. Yeah, I've ripped media.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

I stopped bothering at a certain point because I was like, why am I even doing this? If as long as I have the thing, then what difference does it make? I'll just download it.

[Luke]

There are people that want to play it directly off though. And a lot of those people. People's. My goodness. A lot of those people have been using consoles for a while now.

[Linus]

Yeah, I've never owned a PlayStation and

[Luke]

with next gen consoles probably not having disk drives.

[Linus]

That's not quite true. I have a PlayStation 2, but I didn't own it when it was current. My friend bought a PlayStation 3 and gave me his old PS2 because it was backwards compatible and he had no use for it.

[Dan]

Sorry.

[Luke]

That's cool.

[Linus]

Just clarification. I like, to be honest, I like

[Luke]

to be upfront transparency with the easiest route and most common route for people to have those drives being gone. And very recently on WAN show us talking about how a bunch of companies that made them are stopping making them at the same time. Physical community is going to be in a tough spot. I suspect there will be like one or two brands that are able to hang on just continuing to make players.

[Linus]

Polaroid still makes film for crying out loud.

[Luke]

So yeah, so I'm sure it'll be okay, but it won't be as easy to get into. Also there was a comment on last WAN show that I made the Apollo 11 movie thing up. What I'm screwing up when I say it and why I got a little weird about it last time is because I keep calling it a movie. It's. It's a dock.

[Linus]

It's why I kept thinking you meant Apollo 13.

[Luke]

I know, but like.

[Linus]

Yeah, no, no, but I thought we found it last week so I knew what you were talking about.

[Luke]

There's. There was more than one comment where people are like, why are you trying to like cover up a mistake? It's not a mistake. I bought this.

[Dan]

Yeah, relax.

[Luke]

I had to go to. I bought it online, I got it Shipped to me. I had to go to a used place because this, as much as it's well rated, is not anywhere near it. Well, as well known as most mainline movie releases like Apollo 13. Yeah. So I couldn't buy a new one of it. I had to buy a used one. But someone said. Or you're just weird. Yeah, I would take that. That's fine. I have no problem with that.

[Linus]

Okay, forget the in game life.

[Luke]

Make it up. I'm sorry, yourself.

[Linus]

Totally changing the subject. Who would inherit your Steam library though if you could leave it to someone?

[Luke]

When do I die?

[Linus]

When your heart stops beating.

[Luke]

No, like, stupid question. No, it's a good question. Like am I?

[Linus]

No, no, no, no.

[Luke]

I know, I know.

[Linus]

No, no.

[Luke]

So you die now or is this.

[Linus]

I mean, you have to write your will now so you don't get to decide after you die.

[Dan]

As soon as the Elder Scroll 6 finishes installing.

[Luke]

That'd be so disappointing. Or lucky. We don't know yet. I. Right now, I think it would be my brother.

[Dan]

Okay. Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And part of that reason is because anything that I have already planned to effectively give to his kids is just going to him.

[Linus]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Luke]

And then he can arbiter it. But yeah, I would. I would say.

[Linus]

Yeah, I. Man, I don't.

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Linus]

I. How would I leave that to one person? Like I. With that sword, the in game sword. Like selling it and then. And then splitting the proceeds. Like that kind of makes sense.

[Luke]

Sorry. Tim said. I'll give you $250 if you leave it to me in your will. I'll give you the $250 now.

[Linus]

Honestly, it sounds like a good deal. You should take it. I don't think he'd kill you. Over $250. There's. You can't lose.

[Luke]

I'd have to like show him proof.

[Linus]

That's a great deal. Why not? Here's my last will and testament to Tim.

[Luke]

I leave my X3. Yeah, I mean, yeah, sure.

[Linus]

You'll just have to. You'll have to put like. I don't know, maybe you could. Maybe you could like. You could like roll up a. Like a password, like a recovery code and then just like embed in your skin so that when you're dead, I mean, it won't hurt. They'll take it out and they'll give it to Tim.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus]

And then he could recover the account. Sounds like G Dub says, do I hear $500? Hold on a second. There's a bidding war starting. Brand says 400, Mr. McQueen. 450 Kirkland signature. 450.

[Luke]

My. My steam account is going to of games on it.

[Linus]

You know the brand Mo says $600. Noki 666 Kinjaro. $1,000. $1,000. Would you take $1,000 to put some random from floatplane in your will to have your Steam account?

[Luke]

It's. It's still going up. I don't think I should answer that.

[Linus]

I mean, that's a pretty. That's a pretty good amount of money. You could. You could afford multiple.

[Luke]

You could afford half a steam machine.

[Linus]

You could afford. Afford to give someone two epic flying mounts for that. Or get them. Wait, hold on.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah, you could afford to hold on. You could afford to buy enough wow. Gold to get two real world mounts. Hold on. And then they would both have epic flying mounts. Yeah, right.

[Luke]

You're an epic flying mount distributor.

[Linus]

You could get them some chicken too, maybe.

[Luke]

No, it's not needed in this case.

[Linus]

Right. You don't need it.

[Luke]

Yep, that's what the flying.

[Linus]

That chicken flies.

[Luke]

You want a K truck? Oh, dude. Now we're getting into like. Oh, man. Assets.

[Linus]

Okay, wait, someone's offering you a K truck?

[Luke]

The Noki's offering me 1500 and a 5090s.

[Dan]

Hold on.

[Linus]

Tim seems like the most serious, though. He says $500. I will fly to Vancouver. Linus can make a short out of it. Okay, now I'm interested.

[Luke]

Oh, my goodness.

[Dan]

All right.

[Linus]

I think we can. I think we can move on. Okay, this one's funny.

[Luke]

I mean, come to whale land.

[Linus]

This is hilarious.

[Luke]

Okay, there's my. We'll talk about it. Come to whale.

[Linus]

Bloomberg reports Netflix viewers are abandoning shows after one season. Yeah, Netflix's biggest hits are losing more than half of their audience after one season. And I don't know, the paywall came up, but I'm pretty sure I read more about this somewhere before, and apparently their executives are trying to figure out why. So the Internet had some ideas for why. Maybe it's because you get invested in a Netflix show and then they just don't finish it.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Linus]

Maybe it's because they do a season of a show and it's like a handful of episodes and you're hooked, you're riveted, and then the next season comes out, like, years later and you've moved on in your. With your life.

[Luke]

I. So I think that's true. I also think. And you know this. If this is completely true, I think this would have happened years ago, but in the era of everyone watches things on tv, things would just kind of show up and people would lean towards different options more. Right now there is so many options and you're starting to see this on YouTube where back in the day you used to be able to do series on YouTube and people would retune in all the time. They would watch the follow up episodes and that is rough now.

[Linus]

Yeah, playlists get like, guys, no traction. Like I will see. Occasionally I'll see someone talk about like. Oh yeah. Oh, hey, can you guys do. Can you guys do a playlist for. For tech House? Actually, I thought, I thought we had one. Oh yeah, here it is. Can you guys do a playlist for tech? Dude, dude, nobody clicks on this. I don't. I can't bring up the metrics right now because I'm not signed into the right account on this computer. But like literally no one tunes in to that playlist.

[Luke]

Yeah, no, yeah, but. But even any form of multi episode content like this is.

[Linus]

This isn't even serialized thing we've done in years. But it's not even.

[Luke]

I wouldn't even call this multi episode.

[Linus]

I mean, it's got an intro.

[Luke]

This is multiple episodes on the same topic. This is multiple pieces of content on the same topic.

[Linus]

It has.

[Luke]

You're not really posing. This is like episode two.

[Linus]

It has a theme song.

[Luke]

Yeah, but you're not posing this as episode. Whatever.

[Linus]

But it has, it has a. Like, look at it. It's a. It's a. It's a show, it's an episode. Come on, look at this.

[Luke]

It's not the same thing. In my mind, I understand what you're saying and I don't even think you're wrong, but something about it is. Something about it is off for me. And I don't know what. Yeah, maybe it's just the packaging, maybe it's just that you guys aren't including an episode number and stuff like that. But I feel like one of the reasons why you're doing that.

[Linus]

It's because it doesn't work.

[Luke]

Is because it doesn't work.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And it would probably deter people if anything.

[Dan]

Lifetime playlist views. Yeah, 87,000.

[Linus]

That's actually more than I thought.

[Luke]

And it's still very low.

[Linus]

That's still that, like, not, not a that. That's not gonna move the needle for us at.

[Dan]

At our scale out of 7.3 million total views.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah. Cool. Good chat.

[Luke]

Yeah, episodic stuff is tough these days. People just want to binge the hell out of something and then move on.

[Dan]

Yep.

[Linus]

What else we got here? Hey, this is fun. This is another. This is another we get to go on an adventure and try something topic. Knockoff is a new Chrome extension and Luke's going to install it right now from Josh Pigford that claims to filter knockoff items and junk brands from your Amazon search results. The extension currently works on Amazon.com and.com be and lets you label.

[Luke]

I will not install it right now.

[Linus]

Oh, you won't?

[Luke]

Nope.

[Linus]

Oh, oh, oh,

[Luke]

I did. Okay, you got it.

[Linus]

Thanks to Threat Locker, which is a really good piece of software. It is actually good and it's really good. It said no to him installing a

[Luke]

random this to be able to be randomly installed browser extensions. Extensions are a very fantastic way to exfiltrate a very large amount of data.

[Linus]

So we're not endorsing this thing, we're just trying it live and hopefully not compromising our infrastructure. Anyway, the point is, what it lets you do is label, dim, or totally hide sort of rando suspect items as well as giving you the option to hide sponsored listings entirely or even filter out established Chinese brands if that's something that you feel the need to do. It seems a little hit or miss here. We can look at the results for no, because I don't think it's going to work because I don't have the extension. So you'll have to click on them. It seems a little hit or miss. Jordan, who prepared this topic, gave us a couple links to click on like Dog Bed, where it worked pretty well, and SDXC Card where it only blocked one of the dozens of Gigastone results. And Jordan also said from my quick testing, it only works on search results. That is your URL looks like Amazon.coms?k equals. If you're just clicking around, it doesn't really do anything. Our discussion question while Luke's going ahead and installing it is where does an extension like this fit in the ad blocking conversation? I would say for sponsored items, it fits very well with the ad blocking conversation. But in terms of filtering out brands that I'm not interested in, I feel like that's. I feel like I'm not even costing them anything. I'm just making sure that my eyes don't have to see stuff that I knew I wasn't gonna wanna buy anyway. Like, just give me like a JBL Bluetooth speaker rather than a random one. Okay, so you've got it set to. To dim items from like rando brands.

[Luke]

Control it here.

[Linus]

Okay, let's have a look.

[Luke]

So let's do hidden maybe.

[Linus]

No, no, I want to see dimmed because I want to see what it's. What it's filtering out. So okay, so eh, yoga brand it gets rid of but the Bedshore Orthopedic dog bed is allowed.

[Luke]

Who decides? I don't know.

[Linus]

It's a good question because to me Sun Hair bed doesn't sound any worse than Poc Blue. Hmm.

[Luke]

Likely pseudo brand on the known pseudo brand list. Then you can control it, report as real cool. I mean that's cool.

[Linus]

Okay, so we're in the very early stages of this maybe being a more crowdsourced thing.

[Luke]

This could be pretty sick. Genuinely. I almost feel like I need a browser now for shopping that I can. That I can add a bunch of add ons to that I only really use for shopping. Because like we, we talked recently about how Vinegar is like maybe becoming a thing.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Which is a.

[Linus]

Go ahead.

[Luke]

It's a, it's a project I've talked about someone hopefully taking for a while and somebody did and they're working, working on it and they, they seem to talk about like they have a privacy policy and blah blah blah blah. But extensions are just kind of spooky. Now if you're someone who has. Whoa, bug almost flew directly to my eyeball. If you're someone who has just a billion extensions installed anyways and you don't really care, which to be honest, I think is most people, then just maybe go for it and who cares and you can have Vinegar and you can have knockoff whatever installed and then your shopping experience is going to actually be pretty cool. I think with the combination. That's pretty sick. But my God, browser extensions that can just read your data is crazy.

[Linus]

Like yeah, people be like all mad about Windows Recall and then meanwhile installing browser extensions.

[Luke]

Let me just install every extension ever.

[Linus]

Yeah. It's a really funny thing how we selectively apply our principles on privacy and I mean inclusive of everyone's got their lines. Yeah. And everyone's got their blind spots where they just didn't think of it or the convenience outweighs

[Dan]

the risk.

[Luke]

Right now for I use Chrome for work. I find I have a ton of different work profiles and I find profile switching in Chrome to be unmatched. But for personal, I only really have one profile I use often. So I just run one browser genuinely generally. And usually it's Zen, which is a Firefox spinoff. But lately I've been poking around with Waterfox as well and knowing that there's like 10 billion different Firefox and Chromium iterations. You could have different browsers with different add on loadouts for different things.

[Linus]

Totally.

[Luke]

It might genuinely be reasonable to have like with. With the current state of shopping, it might be reasonable to have a shopping browser where you have some of these different add ons enabled. Because like, I mean, that's pretty sweet. It is difficult these days, honestly. And it's like everywhere. Yeah, Walmart's website, Best Buys website.

[Linus]

Many websites are like, they're just marketplaces now and they're unusable. Yeah, they're just so full of just like spin the wheel to get a discount and oh, are you sure you want to navigate here? And like, just go away and let me just find the thing. I'm trying to give you money. Get out of my way. It's wild, dude.

[Luke]

Using derivatives of Firefox still absolutely supports Firefox. I just want to flag that real quick. And the container tabs is just not as good as Chromium profiles, at least for me personally. And I will continue to use Chrome for work. I've always had a very specific line that I can have my personal preferences for things, but if it's slower or gets in the way of productivity and I'm using it for work, I will not use it. I will use the work standard thing. So I use Chrome.

[Linus]

Okay, Noki sent something over. I'll bite. I'll click the link. It's called How I Experience Web today dot com. Okay, I searched something. This shows me something. Okay. Oh God.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Okay. No, yeah. Okay. Block for sure. No, thanks.

[Dan]

Oh, I love this.

[Linus]

This is great.

[Dan]

Go away.

[Linus]

This is really funny. This is a static ad. An article I want to read. Yeah. How can I help? Oh my God. There's actually not enough interruptions in this content. There should be way more ads. Dude, there's.

[Luke]

Honestly, this isn't enough ads.

[Linus]

There's. There's a. There's a news site that keeps showing up in my Google feed that gets me to click it pretty often that will replay video ads for forever after you close them. It'll just keep reopening them no matter how many times you close them. It's like, dude, I closed the ad. I am trying to read the article. Please move. Oh, when you go to close the tab, it does this.

[Luke]

That's actually pretty good. I like that.

[Linus]

That's pretty funny.

[Luke]

My little project of having no infinite scrolling on my phone has been really interesting. Yeah, it's. It's been really interesting because now that I'm at Zero. I never felt this until I got to zero. But now that I'm at zero, every once in a while my brain will go like, all right, give me some of that just junk, dopamine. And I'll. I'll pull the phone out and go to scroll on something. And there's nothing I can go to.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And I have the little, like, brain moment where. Where it's like, I'll have to find

[Linus]

something else to do.

[Luke]

Let me go do. Let me go scroll something. And it's like, no, I have to do something else. And it is always better every time. I've never been like, oh, man, I really wish I spent the last hour just scrolling stuff. I won't remember ever. Like, I've never had that reaction. And it's been. It's been interesting, but it's like, it has to be defended, which is a weird thing. Like, I had to install. I don't know what it was recently. I think it was X or something because I had to check a message.

[Linus]

X going to give it to you.

[Luke]

And I just.

[Dan]

I.

[Luke]

You. I have to uninstall it right after I do the thing. It's. It's. I have, like, single purpose. Okay. I am going into this. I'm checking a dm. I'm responding to the dm. I am uninstalling the application. There's no. You can't. You can't leave it there. Whatever. Because that moment when your brain's like, let me do the thing. It has to not be able to. Yeah, that's the trick. And it.

[Dan]

You.

[Luke]

I, like, I'm. I'm kind of over the whole time limits thing because they're all too easy to ignore. I've watched people that I've talked to about doing this repeatedly. Just click the. No, I'll take 10 more minutes or whatever. That is able to be easily done in, like, basically every app that has a time limit thing. Are you wearing the Google Fit Whoop thing? It's. It's. Yeah, the Google Fitbit Zero or whatever it's called. Yeah, it's like the one wearable I've been able to consistently wear. Interesting.

[Linus]

And this is a man that couldn't even wear pants to work. Yeah, it's pretty impressive.

[Luke]

I am very surprised I haven't lost it yet. I don't suspect it'll make it too much longer.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Luke]

But, yeah, it's been pretty okay. It's not amazing.

[Linus]

Cool.

[Luke]

And they try to sell you on AI stuff constantly.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Luke]

But it's fine. I'm using it basically as a sleep and step tracker and it's doing totally fine at both of those things. And I'm not subscribed to anything or getting any AI stuff or whatever.

[Dan]

Dude.

[Linus]

It's so annoying that you have to have the meta app in order to use their smart glasses because it will just ping you. You can't really turn off notifications entirely because there's like, stuff you might need to do. Like it might have a sync error when ingesting your video or whatever. But I was using it for like a family vlog video recently. We're actually going to put that channel live pretty soon.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

And so I like had to use the app and it's just like pinging me about random stuff and there's just like garbage AI slop all over it and it's just so annoying. Anyway. Hey. On the subject of privacy, the EU is now mandating that every new car sold has to have an advanced Driver Distraction Warning, or ADDW device which uses a camera to track your gaze. This will be true as of July 7 under the final phase of the general safety regulation. So in practice, this means a small infrared camera near the steering wheel that tracks your eyes, head position and your gaze. Look away from the road for more than three and a half seconds if you're above 50 kilometers an hour or six seconds at lower speeds. And the car will escalate through visual, audio and haptic warnings until you look back at the road. It activates automatically above about 20 kilometers an hour. And while you can switch it off manually, it runs RE enables every time you start the car. This rule has technically applied to newly designed models since 2024, and then July 7th closed the loophole for everything else. The good news is the privacy protections, at least on paper, are actually pretty decent. The regulation requires processing in a closed loop inside the vehicle. It explicitly bans facial recognition and biometric identification. It forbids the data being made available to third parties and requires it to be deleted immediately after processing. The problem is enforcement. Yeah, we're, we're learning a lot about that over the last two years and change. There is no law that nobody, if nobody, is willing to enforce it. There's no independent audit mechanism to verify that any automaker actually complies, no defined retention window. And this lands in an industry where a 2023 Mozilla review found that roughly 84% of car brands share or sell driver data. Early real world impressions.

[Luke]

My car doesn't.

[Linus]

Well, yes, that's true.

[Luke]

It's a dumb car.

[Linus]

Early real world impressions are mixed. Belgian outlet Go car tested an Xpeng P7 plus and found that it flagged a driver for glancing at scenery on an empty highway. And one Ford Puma renter described distraction warnings every 10 minutes, with the alerts themselves becoming the distraction. On the other side. The EU estimates that distraction plays a role in 5 to 25% of crashes and projects the full safety package will save over 25,000 lives by 2038.

[Luke]

I. Well, I don't necessarily agree because, I mean, if the warnings themselves are a distraction.

[Linus]

Dude, it is.

[Luke]

So what are we talking about?

[Linus]

Flipping obnoxious. How often my car will just like wrench my steering wheel away from me.

[Luke]

This was exactly what I was going to talk about. I drive Emma's car.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And it has like lane keep assist and stuff. There was an area near our place that was under construction for a while and it had cones in a certain area that did not follow the road lines. And the car would try to throw me into the cones all the time, which had workers behind it. The car was trying to throw itself into people like, no, I hate it so much. It might be better for some people maybe, but like, my God. Oh, not good. Oof. That happened with my mom's car while I was avoiding a cyclist. Yeah, I don't like things like lane, lane assist and whatnot. I know people that do. I know a fair amount of people that do.

[Linus]

I know people that should use it. Sure, there's some pretty bad drivers out there.

[Luke]

Yeah. But like, dang, man.

[Linus]

Oh, you know what? No, we'll do that one later.

[Dan]

Sponsors.

[Linus]

Oh, oh, sponsors.

[Dan]

Right.

[Linus]

Okay. We've got some really good topics. Sorry, I got distracted. The show is brought to you by Toshiba. Really? Oh, hi Toshiba. I don't think you've ever sponsored wan show before. Nice to have you around.

[Luke]

Hello.

[Linus]

Your business needs to have a place to store and backup data and files as well as way to access them quickly. Toshiba's N300 Pro is a reliable and scalable internal hard drive from for your team's network attached storage and each is optimized for a 24.7 RAID environment and at 7200 RPM spindle speeds with sustained transfers above 309. Oh, above 300 megabytes a second. You and your team can access what you need when you need it.

[Dan]

Sorry.

[Linus]

Up to 309. Sorry, I better get that. Right. That 24. 7 operation is backed with a workload rate of up to 550tb. Per year as well as a five year limited warranty. Toshiba works with a wide range of NAS system manufacturers to extensively test their drives and ensure compatibility with most NAS systems. They also use something called NasLink, which is firmware that can adjust to mixed NAS workloads to make the most out of cache usage in real time so you get consistent performance for file sharing, backups and RAID operations. So pick up some Toshiba N300 Pro drives for your NAS today using our link in the video description. The show is also brought to you by Motion Gray. Working eight hours a day at your desk, then spending several hours at another desk at home while gaming can certainly make your lower back feel less than stellar. It's important to take breaks in between emails and ranked matches to stretch your legs and back and Motion Grace Ergo Pro two Sit Stand Desk can help with that. You can work while standing for longer periods. Plus the desk comes with a custom with a bunch of customization options like cable management or foot massagers. No matter what size desk you go with, Motion Graze Ergo 2 supports up to 176 pounds and comes in both light and dark color options. The desk is easy to clean, has smooth edges, and is built to handle most scuffs and scratches that a desk would face. Not to mention it's powered by German Bosch motors. You know the Germans always make good stuff. When you order your desk everything, everything comes in a single box so you don't have to worry about getting your legs on Friday and then the actual desk after the weekend. And everything you need to assemble, including the necessary tools, is packaged with the desk. So grab your motion gray Ergo 2 Pro at our link in the video description.

[Luke]

My first laptop was a Toshiba and I actually really really liked it.

[Dan]

I gotta get some new drives. I'm approaching five years. No errors yet. Oh, they're gonna be expensive.

[Linus]

Yeah, I was gonna say this. Oh, the show is brought to you. No, no show is brought to you

[Luke]

by the next topic.

[Linus]

The color blue, the letter E. Lenovo is now shipping laptops with Chinese nand and Apple has begun testing CXMT chips. It begins, that's right, Notebook Check says. Notebook Check says. In the midst of the RAM and SD crisis, a new player has appeared. This YMTC SSD shipping in the ThinkBook 14G9 in Europe but not North America, is a 512 gig M2 2242 drive that has sequential reads up to 3950 megabytes a second and writes up to 2514. That's below average for an SSD in an office laptop these days, and it apparently throttles under load, but in everyday use is still more than fast enough. And then in related news, Apple is testing memory chips from CXMT for Apple devices sold in China. The company is also lobbying Washington to allow broader use of CXMT chips, despite geopolitical sensitivities. Financial Times says CXMT is now the world's fourth largest DRAM maker and a key pillar of China's semiconductor ambitions, though analysts say its production is still too constrained to meaningfully ease the global memory crunch anytime soon. But those Apple dollars would probably help to turn that around. In other China news, ByteDance and Alibaba have killed custom AI companions following new rules in China. This is the their China is putting into effect what they're calling interim measures for AI anthropomorphic interaction services on July 15th. And basically this policy is designed to prohibit services that simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns, and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction. So customer service bots, knowledge Q&As, workplace assistance, and education and research tools are excluded provided that they avoid sustained emotional interaction. So next web.com the next web.com says companions out workers in so both ByteDance and Alibaba have just killed their their products that were designed to provide companionship. It is very disappointing to me whenever I have to side with the Chinese government and acknowledge that they're just doing a common sense thing that probably everyone should be doing.

[Luke]

I don't know. Blade Runner is pretty cool.

[Linus]

I saved the best topic for last

[Luke]

Nvidia is making new cards.

[Linus]

Yeah,

[Luke]

Nvidia is dropping a free limited edition GeForce Trading Card Series 1 collection celebrating iconic GPUs, games and RTX tech demos. You can get them through Summer of RTX giveaways or at select gaming events while supplies laugh last. Nathan thought possibly not appropriate or copyright safe, but it reminds me of a bit of Flanders Bible trading cards from the Simpsons.

[Linus]

Yeah, that's a deep cut. That's an old reference.

[Luke]

I don't remember that. I actually used to watch a lot of Simpsons. I don't remember that. I don't think we should watch it though.

[Linus]

We're not going to. I'm going to Jordan Block.

[Luke]

Can't wait for Nvidia's crossover with Magic the Gathering. And based on some of Magic's previous crossovers and Nvidia partnership isn't even that far fetched. Cool Discussion Question do you have any rare slash interesting tech merch that you're particularly fond of. Oh my God.

[Dan]

So good. Okay.

[Luke]

I like the. The 1000 series launch. They sent out those like weird triangles.

[Linus]

Oh yeah, I remember that.

[Luke]

I actually thought that was really cool because it felt like. Like a Nathan Drake artifact. Uncharted.

[Linus]

You know, Da Vinci Code.

[Luke]

And it's funny, I still have it in my like little storage unit thing and whenever I pull it out, I'm like, what is this? Because the box isn't really marked much. And I open it up, I'm like, oh yeah. And there's just an unmarked look letter and then the triangle. I'm like, this is cool. When I die eventually and someone gets this, they're gonna be like, what they

[Linus]

used to do such cool stuff. Remember when they sent out those. Those green crowbars? Yeah, yeah.

[Luke]

Just actually kind of sick.

[Linus]

Yeah, we have. Okay, we have a GeForce ammo box kicking around somewhere that the. I believe the. Oh man, the 590, I guess it was the dual GPU one from that generation. Yeah, I. I know at least one reviewer who card arrived damaged because like it wasn't really quite big enough and like not packed that well, but it was cool.

[Luke]

Yep.

[Linus]

So anyway, people are just trying to

[Luke]

buy everything I have now someone's trying to offer me money for the triangle. Go away.

[Linus]

That would be a very interesting auction around here. Like. Like the. The LMG Goes out of Business auction. Just like all the weirdest.

[Luke]

Some stuff I'd be interested in for sure.

[Linus]

Sure.

[Luke]

Oh,

[Linus]

I assume you'd want this.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. That's for sure what I was talking about. Yeah, for sure. Reverse it. Reverse it real quick. Nice. Very good.

[Dan]

My.

[Linus]

My daughter was in the office earlier this week and she came across this and was just very enamored by it and she dragged it into the video that we were shooting together. Great. It was a fun video though. So I told her, yeah, I'll buy a new battery for your phone, but you have to put it in. And she came and she helped me do a battery swap.

[Luke]

I need to do that soon. I was thinking recently I've heard about some of the leak rumors of the Pixel 11 and it sounds really not cool, but I'm on a Pixel 8, so it's starting to feel a little bit old. And I was thinking, honestly, the only thing that's really feeling that old about it is the battery. So maybe I should just do a little swap. Not even upgrade. Because honestly, at this point, like, who cares? My phone is fine.

[Linus]

Dude, dude, her phone is 6 years old and I couldn't even like tell she's on a note. 10. I didn't even realize how old that phone was until, until I looked it up and I was like, oh yeah, that battery is at the end.

[Luke]

Yeah. Yeah. So my phone is three years old. Ish. It's right about that. Like the normal cadence I would expect.

[Linus]

Yeah, I bet.

[Luke]

To potentially replace a phone.

[Linus]

Fresh battery and a graphene OS install and it'll feel like a brand new phone.

[Luke]

Yeah. So like whatever.

[Linus]

Just like it's a brand new after dark. Dan, do you want to hit us with some checkout messages?

[Dan]

Oh yeah. Just getting good at these transitions. I don't even have time anymore. That button. That button. Okay, I did it. Now I have to read things.

[Luke]

Good job, Dan.

[Dan]

I've only done a couple of these. Leave me alone. Hey, Laku lines and done. One of my co workers just got a shirt with the definition of ask hole on it. Very funny. Do you have any fun, any type of stories of ask holes in your lives?

[Luke]

What's an a person who asks for advice but refuses to follow it. A person who asks excessive or offensive questions or favors. Oh man. I actually don't feel like I run into this too often.

[Linus]

Oh, I definitely do. I like some other people in the tech industry. I have a not super secret contact info and I, you know, other than this makes sense. Other, other than people just like soliciting crap which I just ignore and filter forever. You know, I try to. If someone, you know, has a really good idea for a video, you'll occasionally see us acknowledge it. Like in the video I'll be like, yeah, so and so sent the thing. To be clear, it's not the best way to get acknowledged. Probably I'm more likely to ignore you if you email me versus if you like you know, at me on the forum or something like that. But I do get some people who, you know, I will, I'll, I'll send a like hey, thanks for you know, whatever you appreciate you like I, we're not pen pals and I have limited time to reply to like work related emails and stuff. So some people just don't really seem to like get it that this is like no, sorry, no like one email.

[Luke]

You can't stop me. I'll still email you every few years.

[Linus]

Yeah, no key. That's fine. You like actual like we pay you and stuff. Like you kind of work here sort of from around the globe. It's complicated.

[Luke]

Anyway, yeah, so I mean I've read into this. I like, I, I, I, I You know, you read it and I recognize it. I get it. Super common at events.

[Linus]

People will come and they'll ask you a question and you'll be like, oh yeah, I don't know, this motherboard seems pretty good. It has the features you want. And then they're like, oh yeah, like what GPU should I plug into? I'm like, bro, I like, I go watch, go watch a video. That's what I do for a living, is I make content so that you can go watch it and then you know the answer. So yeah, it's tough. It's tough.

[Dan]

More.

[Linus]

As for like asking advice only to ignore the guidance, I definitely, I'm not willing to throw any real life people under the bus over this, but I think everyone has people in their life who mostly when they ask for advice, just want to make noise.

[Luke]

Hot take. Yeah, I think everyone's done that.

[Linus]

Everyone's done it, but some people do it a lot.

[Dan]

That's fair.

[Linus]

Everyone does something that's against the better judgment of them and everyone in their life once in a while.

[Luke]

Yeah,

[Linus]

I bought a plane. I've broken him. I knew that was gonna get him an epic flying mount, says Amari. We've broken him, ladies and gentlemen.

[Luke]

Oh my God.

[Linus]

Dan, hit me.

[Dan]

Sure. Question for Slick. Did you ever complete Star Wars Outlaws? I just did and I enjoyed it.

[Luke]

No, I didn't.

[Dan]

Hello, Mr.

[Luke]

I. I might go back to it at some point. I don't even remember why I stopped. It might have been Linux challenge in general. I'm not finding Ubisoft games to be very friendly with Linux.

[Linus]

Yeah, hello, Mr.

[Dan]

Tip of Technology. In a previous show you said you wouldn't let your kids be esport pros. Just want to hear your reasoning.

[Linus]

Okay, yeah, I can explain that pretty easily. Actually. The. It's for the same reason that I won't let my kids play the lottery. Because while the reward at the end of the rainbow is theoretically totally worth the time investment, the very, very select few who make it to that point are very few and very select. And literally everyone else who invested all of that time and all that singular focus and energy into that one thing will not go pro and will ultimately have to be a well rounded person who knows other things about other things and can do other stuff. So it's not so much that I would have objected to them achieving the pinnacle of success in gaming, it's that we weren't going to do all the stuff that was going to give them that shot. They were not going to spend that much Time in front of a screen, period. I just don't think it's part of. To be clear, they are allowed to play video games and they get screen time pretty much every day. They trade it for doing other enriching things.

[Luke]

It doesn't even feel like a particularly low amount of screen time. There's just like you said, they gotta do stuff to.

[Linus]

My son's really good at Rocket League and pretty darn good at Minecraft. He's had enough time to like get good enough at video games that. Cuz video games are a huge social thing. I don't want them to be.

[Luke]

You don't want to just like suck?

[Linus]

Yeah. You don't want them to not be able to like hang out and play some ultimate chicken horse.

[Luke]

Yes, exactly.

[Linus]

Yeah, like that's not actually good either. Yeah, so. So for me it was, it is

[Luke]

a current cultural thing.

[Linus]

It was just part of. It was part of the whole strategy of wanting to raise balanced human beings. And for the same reason, while I support like sports, for instance, I've made it very clear from day zero that like you're not going to be a professional athlete not because it's impossible, but because the odds are so slim that I might as well be saying you will not win the lottery.

[Luke]

What if?

[Linus]

Yes.

[Luke]

And I feel like I know we're gonna go with this, but I'm just gonna throw the what if anyways. Yeah, what if. You know, little man is really, really, really, really, really, really good at a certain thing.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

He goes to provincials for it and he's the MVP on the winning team of provincials. The chances at that point are genuinely quite high. What do you do?

[Linus]

So at that point what we do is we basically lay down some ground rules because he's old enough by then that he's. It's time to start making his own choices. Because that's like, that's the esports. Oh, right. That's the third pillar of why no esports. Because your career is over when you're like 26 and you might be able to be a successful streamer. But a lot of esports pros do not successfully transition there. So that was the last part of that one. Sports has a bit of a little bit of a higher ceiling. I mean, what. Djokovic is still playing at an elite level in tennis. He's almost 40.

[Luke]

I think honestly sports is way more potentially stable of a path than esports is like traditional.

[Linus]

I don't even think that's a crazy take.

[Luke]

I don't think so. Either.

[Linus]

So. So, okay, so by that point he's old enough that he's starting to have some of his own agency. Right up until that point, we've been pretty supportive. So him in particular, he's for one athletic pursuit or another, been training as often as three to four times a week for his entire childhood. Pretty much going back like six, seven, eight years now. So we're supportive of be good at sports because that's another thing that's really important socially. It is hard to meet people as adults, but if you are good at

[Luke]

a sport, it actually becomes way easier.

[Linus]

It's amazing how many doors get open for you. Like when I was getting into badminton, it was so hard to socially network with people in that community. All of a sudden now that I'm pretty good, people like want to meet you and it's like, oh, that just. I was never good at sports. So that was not a, that was not a window that I had ever looked through. But it's totally a thing. And, and so a lot of it's

[Luke]

honestly, once you get to a certain age, people are trying to do the activity and holding your hand is not really doing the activity.

[Linus]

Yeah, that's something you do for your girlfriend or your boyfriend.

[Luke]

Almost doesn't even matter what the activity is. Sports is a good example here. It could be a lot of different things.

[Linus]

Video games too.

[Luke]

Yep. Where it's like, man, like, okay, if you want to play with us, sure sounds good. But you should probably go like kind of figure it out on your own and then come join us once you know what you're doing.

[Linus]

Yep. The one. Except if I see two people on a court or like two people playing a video game who have like a vastly different level of skill, my assume is they're related or they're banging.

[Luke]

Yep. Like there's, there's already a different or

[Linus]

they want to related reason.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah. They want to be either.

[Linus]

That's the saddest of the three.

[Luke]

Yeah. You have some like highly invested, very long term reason why you might want to. Whatever. Maybe this is a friend that you've played a lot of other games with and they just haven't played this one. And you're, you're pretty sure they'll pick it up pretty quick. So you just need to kind of get them there or whatever. Like that's fine.

[Linus]

So. Yeah. Would we, would we support pursuing a professional athlete path? I think what it would look like is helping them make their own decision and helping them come to a conclusion that you need to set Some guardrails here, and you need to have an escape hatch, I think, because it probably won't work out. But if you could win some scholarships, by all means, win the scholarships. We will. We will, you know, give you the resources to. To hone this skill. But you're still going to school.

[Luke]

I think there's also a tremendous amount of skills that you learn from both, but more traditional sports, in my opinion, but from both that do transfer out of it. And traditional sports, there's plenty of athletes that have become pro and gotten proper good degrees and done lots of things outside of that, because you need rest time and stuff much more than you need it in the esports world.

[Linus]

Oh, this is so true too.

[Luke]

So, like, in that rest time, in that downtime, you could be doing other stuff. You could be studying, you could be doing whatever else.

[Linus]

You can't be in the gym all day.

[Luke]

Yeah, you need to rest and like, you might be young and not feel like that's as true, but it's. It's gonna become more true. Uh, and it is pretty true for you as well. So, like, there is. There is more inherent built in downtime with traditional sports.

[Linus]

Um, and I think sports teaches us a lot about how to deal with people, social situations.

[Luke]

Yeah, it's very easy to cycle people out in the video game world. It's a lot harder to do that when you're on a team, and those aren't even your decisions anyways.

[Linus]

So. Yeah, bottom line is,

[Luke]

you know, look at Shaq. He transitioned from sports to everything. Yeah, that's pretty good.

[Linus]

Want to buy a printer? All right, go ahead. Hit me down.

[Dan]

Sure thing. Hey, Wanda, dlo, Luke, loving bud and pal with Sammy. Do you all have any preliminary ideas for future videos? What's coming next? It was awesome to meet you all in Taiwan, minus Dan. I'm glad you. I'm glad you're happy I wasn't there.

[Luke]

I don't think that's what he meant. I don't know. Sort of. We've done some ideation, but it's not like it's as I've talked about on the show before. It's. It's a. It's a creative brain stretching exercise. It's not a job. So, like, it'll happen when it happens. We were planning a shoot for, like, maybe late next month.

[Linus]

If you go paintballing, I'm in.

[Luke]

Oh, interesting. That's a fun idea.

[Linus]

I don't know if that's a video, but whatever.

[Luke]

We. There would have to be some, like, weird challenge involved or something. But I'm sure we could figure something out.

[Linus]

I'm down for weird challenges. Challenge. Sprained my ankle even worse playing paintball with Luke again.

[Luke]

Sammy has two different ideas right now, but I don't know how he'd feel with me spoiling them. So I'm gonna.

[Linus]

Oh yeah, no, no, keep them to yourself.

[Dan]

Hold.

[Luke]

I'm gonna hold them for now. But they're. They're pretty creative. Sammy's a very creative guy.

[Linus]

He is that.

[Luke]

This for me has been a really good experience because of that largely. Like I've technically made a ton of content, but it's either been Wancho or tech stuff with a tiny amount of channel super fun thrown in. But the channel super fun. I was very much just participator.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And they were all like pretty similarly flavored, if that makes sense. So this is Sammy going crazy and doing Sammy things. Me trying to hold on largely. Which is fun and I think good for my brain because it gets me out of just the doing kind of the same thing all the time. Which is, which is good. Especially I find when you get older that can be. Become a much more of a default state. And it's one of the reasons why it feels like time goes so fast is because there's not a lot of deviation to your day. You just kind of do the same thing, you're working on the same problems, you start finding routine because that's what's efficient and you hang out with the same people, you talk about the same things, etc. So yeah, getting out there and doing something different has been really fun. I'm excited to keep doing more of it and I'm happy you enjoyed it. But it's not. The schedule is always going to be completely random because it's just going to be like whatever we can swing. We are going to try to figure out more like one day shoot things

[Linus]

that would be, that would be a way to make it not so onerous. Yeah.

[Luke]

So the, the plan moving forward is the, the, the, the two plans that he has are both one day shoots. So we can just do it on like a, you know, a Saturday or whatever. So. Well, we'll see how it goes.

[Linus]

All right, well, I volunteer as tribute if you guys ever need a third butt.

[Luke]

Yeah. Sweet.

[Linus]

I'll, I'll mention that not always around, but. And, and there's no pressure.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

I don't want to insert myself.

[Luke]

We'll. We'll see how it goes. I'm sure we'll do something at some point that Makes sense to have a bigger group of people.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Dan]

Yeah. Linus, where have you gone? Skiing. What was your favorite? I love skiing. My favorite was Lake Tahoe. Love the Undies. I, too, picked skiing back up after 25 years. Wow.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Dan]

How do you ski on a lake? Is my one question.

[Linus]

I think it's a mountain near the lake, Dan, but yes.

[Dan]

Well, you didn't say that. You should have said that.

[Linus]

You should have been more specific water skiing. Oh, that's pretty good.

[Dan]

That's good.

[Linus]

That's good.

[Dan]

Now I look like an idiot more than normal.

[Linus]

Well, it's not so much that you look like an idiot. It's more sound like an idiot.

[Dan]

Sound like an idiot.

[Linus]

Well, why not both?

[Luke]

I would have laughed so hard if you put the. The card up of us. Just put your head in Linus's little.

[Dan]

Yeah, it's too hard.

[Linus]

I've actually not been skiing that many places. I've been up to hemlock, which I think is called something else out in, like, Agassi Mission area. I. I don't know what they're called now. I've been to on Grouse and Seymour locally. I've skied Whistler here a lot when I was younger, but I wouldn't bother going up there now.

[Luke]

It's just super overcrowded and super expensive.

[Linus]

Yeah, like, it just manages to be the worst of both worlds. Like, if it was crazy expensive, it was like, you know, I. I don't even. I don't even. I don't even know.

[Luke]

But if it was like, that would be.

[Linus]

It was like, more. But I just, like, skied right onto the lift at the bottom and there's fresh powder everywhere. Then I might. Yeah, then I might even consider that

[Luke]

as like, a special treat.

[Linus]

But as it is now, it's like, well, it's the worst of both worlds. Or if it was cheap, then final stand in line. But right now it's expensive and I stand in line. What are we even doing here?

[Luke]

I had a pretty good routine of going to Seymour for a while, but Seymour. Like, I'm worried about them.

[Linus]

I.

[Luke]

They're pretty low. I. They barely got any snow last year. Like, I. I'm actually worried about their ability to keep going.

[Linus]

We went to Big White this year for the family vlog, so.

[Luke]

Oh, cool.

[Linus]

Yeah, you'll. You'll see how much I enjoyed Big White. It's freaking awesome.

[Luke]

I was going to say. I'm pretty sure they're holding on pretty okay in regards to snow.

[Linus]

And it was funny. The local. There were Complaining a ton about the snow. I'm like, y' all got snow. Y' all need to shut up. This seems great to me.

[Luke]

That's a luxury right now.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

We've had some real warm winters. I was talking to my brother about this. I remember growing up pulling icicles off the house that were, like, huge. Like, man, when's the last time I saw an icicle hanging off of anything? You feel like it's been a very long time. We had a few years there where we'd get at least, like, a couple weeks of some pretty solid snow, but it's. It's been a while. I think.

[Linus]

It's been a while.

[Dan]

Hey, Linus and Luke. Love the merch. All right, Blocked. What's both of your favorite merch in your wardrobe?

[Luke]

I actually really like this shirt.

[Linus]

Oh, the Siberia. Yeah, it sold really well.

[Luke]

I really like the shirt. I have always really liked shirts where the branding isn't, like, super obvious and where it's small logo front, big logo back. I will say, however, you were right. The green Siberia shirt, where it's big logo front, I do actually like it, but I think it's because it's not a logo. It's more like one of those.

[Linus]

Oh, it's a graphic tea.

[Luke]

Kind of, like, artsy and just kind of neat. I will always kind of fall back to these. Small logo front, big logo, go back. But I. I like Siberia. It's pretty cool.

[Linus]

It's hard for me to pick a favorite child. The new socks are a candidate. I'm really excited about them. If I had to pick something, I think the framework embroidered.

[Luke]

The framework is wicked.

[Linus]

It's so cool.

[Luke]

My favorite all time is the. The 3D down jacket.

[Dan]

We.

[Linus]

We have a. We have a kind of successor. It's not using the same 3D down, but it's a very similar style. It has a bit more reflective. The hood has been fine tuned. I tried it on earlier this week, and we're going ahead to mass production.

[Luke]

My favorite part was not the 3D down.

[Linus]

Yeah, it's. It's. I. I think it's a worthy successor. I think you'll really like it.

[Luke]

My favorite part about that jacket was that it actually looked really, like, clean and sharp. I could wear that with nice clothes and it would fit in. And it's a jacket. Like, it was. It was. It was nice. I actually got a lot of comments on it because I usually wear this and a variation of color of the same pair of shorts almost all of the time. So the fact that I wore something that was kind of nice. People were like, oh, which is not a good sign. And I'm going to be. Yeah, Yeah. I need to cycle the shorts out. This is something I've. I've accepted. It's. It's good for me now because there's the. We have nice pants. The. The tech pants. I do kind of wish there was a couple more colors in the. How are the tech pants selling? I haven't actually.

[Linus]

We're starting to get the hang of bottoms.

[Luke]

Nice. The tall. Well, maybe not nice for other people, but some of the tall tech pants are sold out, which is maybe a good sign for them becoming a thing again.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Yeah. I really. The tech pants are actually very nice.

[Linus]

Hit us, Dan.

[Dan]

Ldl. With the release of the price of the Steam machine, are we optimistic for the price of the frame? Will Luke still buy it?

[Linus]

I mean, I think valve frame kind

[Luke]

of feels like a different category of thing.

[Linus]

I think they're still gonna pull it off. I think they're still going to manage to be pretty close to index pricing because they weren't even trying to be cheap on that one.

[Luke]

Nope.

[Linus]

And I don't know if Luke's gonna buy it. I mean, he bought a big screen beyond two, and then still to. To my knowledge, hasn't used it.

[Dan]

Yeah. When are you gonna try it? I need to know.

[Linus]

Have you tried it? No.

[Luke]

Something that might benefit the frame, though, is that I don't. At this point, I don't think I get esthetic choices when it comes to the. The condo.

[Linus]

Right. Yeah, That's. That's all Emma's domain, I guess.

[Luke]

So the frame might actually be able to be used more easily.

[Linus]

I mean, I think I've told you that I've barely touched me to drill

[Luke]

big boxes in the wall.

[Linus]

I've barely touched my VR setup ever since I put that passive case. You. You know the one I'm talking about, the Kalios collab with Streetcom right now.

[Luke]

Oh, God. It's such a cool case.

[Linus]

Yeah. So ever since I put that there, because of the way the IO works on it, it, like, doesn't really work very well with the little I.O. boxes on the index and the big screen beyond. So it's been, like, kind of janky and weird for, like, quite a while. And what I really want to do is I want to get that case up off the floor so it's, like, more showcasey, get the panels on it properly. Like cable managed it all nicely. But I just kind of. As soon as I found out about the Steam frame, I went, well, I'm not even gonna bother because then everything's gonna be wireless and I'm just kind of sitting here, tappity, tappity, tappity, tappity, tappity, patiently waiting.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus]

Steam frame. Cause even if the displays are not as good as the big screen beyond, I man, the wireless streaming. Dude, I tried it. I was there. I was there when they revealed the wireless streaming. It's so good.

[Dan]

I keep forgetting that it has wireless streaming.

[Linus]

Wireless streaming.

[Dan]

Don't tell me that.

[Luke]

I also, like, I had my bench where the computers are.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And that was very space restrictive. So this last weekend we moved the bench out to a different room where it's kind of like out of the way.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Which is good. And you know, now people won't stub their toes on my weights and stuff, so it probably makes more sense to be over there.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

So maybe that'll clear up some room and maybe I can do that now. But we'll see.

[Dan]

Last one I've got here is for Luke. Question for Luke. Can you shout out any tools the devs have built to up arrow their qual that would be useful outside of ltt? I've been working on a CLI tool for managing the tasks I'm assigned in our project management system. Any quality of life improvement that would

[Luke]

be useful outside of ltt. I mean, we've contributed to open source projects, but outside of that, like the stuff we build internally is not external. LTT Labs has some of their stuff open sourced. You can check out. I think it's literally LTT labs OSS on GitHub, but I don't know. We've built some internal tools.

[Dan]

Ah,

[Luke]

I can't think of much that would be particularly helpful outside of outside of ltt. The main one that I know of is, is called Yelling Bird and it was made by Mr. Peter. And it's just a Slack bot which shows the progress of videos as they transcode on floatplane and the total floatplane infrastructure because it includes Sauceplus. And that's been pretty nice actually, especially because you can do actions from it and stuff. And there's buttons there to open the ACP or the admin UI so you can see what's going on and it has a little progress indicator as it goes and it tells you the unique ID of the video and blah, blah, blah, blah. So like that's, that's really useful. But in terms of like cicd stuff that we built, I don't know. I can't really think of anything. The team will probably shoot me now, but yeah.

[Linus]

Holy crap. I just got invited on a podcast with Victor Axelson. Who? Oh, you know who that is?

[Luke]

Because of you.

[Linus]

Oh, I see. Okay, cool.

[Luke]

You've mentioned him a few times.

[Linus]

I'm excited.

[Luke]

That's cool. That's fun.

[Linus]

Yeah. I met him once already and it was horrible.

[Luke]

I know.

[Linus]

Not because of him. I know because of me.

[Luke]

There's video of this, isn't there?

[Linus]

Unfortunately, yes.

[Luke]

Well, here. Now's your time to make it up.

[Linus]

Yeah. Hopefully it'll be less awkward. I mean, it couldn't be more awkward.

[Luke]

You should bring up the story on the show.

[Dan]

Sure.

[Linus]

Fine. Yeah. Oh, I definitely will because I'm gonna have to explain. Explain myself.

[Luke]

You'll be fine. This is probably good because now you won't be stuck with, like, the one time you met Victor Axelson.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke]

Now you'll have some.

[Linus]

The redeeming time I met Victor Axelson. Yep. People are asking who he is. He's Olympic gold men's singles badminton player. Was world number one for, like, a long time. Absolute Chad. He runs a YouTube channel. Super cool. He actually just recently retired from the tour, but he's still doing content, apparently. And he's going on a podcast.

[Luke]

So do you know when?

[Linus]

Nope. I just got a. I just got a ping from the. The guys who run our badminton club. Apparently the outreach came through them.

[Luke]

Okay. So maybe let. When people know when you know.

[Linus]

Yeah, no, I'm. No, I'm stoked. It'll be awesome.

[Luke]

Sweet.

[Linus]

Yeah, that business is going interesting for Smash Champs. It's.

[Luke]

I heard that call last week.

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Luke]

I doubt you want to talk about that, but.

[Dan]

Which one?

[Luke]

Interesting. The training thing.

[Linus]

Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke]

So we're interesting.

[Linus]

We're going to be running our own training programs rather than partnering with someone else going forward. That's, I think, going to start in September. So we're hiring a head coach right now. And it's one of those things where, like, if it was my full time job, there's like so much stuff that I'd want to do, but also, I think accelerating it to that degree would not be cost effective. So taking this slow and steady approach makes a ton of sense. And the guys who are running it are just like, they're so dialed, like they're so. They're just like badminton people. Like, neither of them had a career whatsoever in, like, badminton, but they just are like super, super, super, super passionate and then just really smart people. And so we kind of figured, well, you know, whatever.

[Luke]

Figure a lot of things.

[Linus]

Smart people who are passionate will figure it out.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And so they did that lead up to like opening was like, was like hell. I'm sure I'm putting words in their mouth, but I'm sure both of them almost quit multiple times. Because starting a startup is hard. Starting something up from nothing is hard. If you've never done it before and you criticize someone else who started something, you need to go do it first. Then you're allowed to throw stones because it's hard. Nobody like something as simple as like picking which payment terminal. Like, it's not simple. Nothing is simple. You have to figure out everything. And so yeah, there. But again, once we got to grand opening, things got better. And they're figuring out a lot. But you know, we're like, we realized something. We had our grand opening tournament about a year ago and we gave away like a lot of like memberships. And what we noticed is like membership signups stalled around. The like one year anniversary went, oh, people are probably waiting for us to like give away more memberships during our anniversary tournament. Like, there's just so many little mistakes you're gonna make. Like, maybe we went too aggressive on that. I don't forget where I was going with this. But it's, it's been interesting. Not really running because I'm more just like the. I'm almost more of like a sponsor of the business or like an investor in the business in a sense. Not that I ever expect like a big return from it or anything because I'm not running it day to day. But it's been very interesting running a completely different business.

[Luke]

And I think it's an investing relationship because you give input and stuff.

[Linus]

Oh yeah, yeah. But I don't. But I don't run it.

[Luke]

Yeah, totally.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

It's like if you think about how Framework originally expected your relationship to work. Oh, that Was it more similar to that? No, they originally want input and stuff.

[Linus]

Framework. I don't even remember.

[Luke]

I thought they wanted to have like calls with you and stuff. And you're just like, whatever, good luck

[Linus]

that might have been. That might have been Eshtek.

[Luke]

Okay, maybe. I don't know.

[Linus]

And I talk to them occasionally. I talk to them occasionally. But that's. Honestly though, that's mostly just because John's super chill and like, I like John.

[Luke]

Yeah, sure.

[Linus]

But that's. That it's funny because that's so much of like how business works. And I never really like wanted it to be like that. Like, if I could, if I could will business to not work like that, if everything was just on merit, if I could will that into existence, I would. But it's just not how it works.

[Luke]

Yeah, some of it makes sense to me. You got to be not horrible to work with.

[Linus]

Oh, I remember what I was trying to say about Smash Champs, right? So one of the things that we're looking at is a way to increase value for our, for our premium members who are the ones that really like help us fund the club. Although you know, everyone who comes and plays, obviously like is. Is appreciated to help, you know, get build momentum and build a community there. But the premium members, the ones who are, who are signing up for the long haul and who are in there, you know, two, three, four, five times a week and are like the, the, the, the seed crystal around which something can grow. Because nobody signs up for a sports session that has zero people. You know what I mean? Like that, like your core.

[Dan]

Right.

[Linus]

So we're trying to find ways to create more value and things like bringing in, you know, former pros or like prominent badminton youtubers to do like clinics and stuff. There's actually a channel that's pretty sick. Badminton Family. Yeah, these guys, these guys are doing a clinic this summer, like at Smash. Yeah, so he came out for like a scouting mission. He was looking for a facility in the Lower mainland to, to do like an in person camp. They apparently do these in, in Denmark. And you basically go for like, I think it's a week and it's for professional amateurs.

[Luke]

And he just happened to be looking for a badminton facility in the Lower mainland.

[Linus]

They wanted to do one in western North America and so he came to, to find the right location.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

And so they, so they do them in Denmark and it's like, it sounds like the kind of thing I'd love to do. They market them to professional amateurs. And you basically go for an entire week and you do nothing but eat, breathe, sleep, badminton for a week. And just like you do training and coaching, you go to the gym, you get a bunch of like one on one time with the coach, you hang, you network with people, you meet people. It sounds really cool. So they're gonna do one at our club.

[Luke]

They sure are.

[Linus]

Yeah. There, there it is. Family Family Camp BC Canada 2026. I don't know if they actually have any spots open, but if they do, then now would be a great time to pay and secure your spot. So we worked out a deal with them where we gave them a really good deal on the court time. So they're still making profit even though they got to come all the way out here in order to host it. And then they have one in Indonesia as well in October, which is super cool. What a, what a neat, neat, like what, what a neat thing to do to kind of really engage in person with your community. And honestly I think it's a pretty good value for what it is.

[Luke]

Interesting.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah. Pretty cool.

[Luke]

Yeah. These types of. Yeah. Four day program.

[Linus]

And he's like a crazy good player. I, I, I play, I played with him just like he was just, he was going easy on me, just goofing around. But just the shot quality and movement, everything cool makes me feel bad but in a motivating way. You know what I mean?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Well, that's all I got.

[Linus]

Yeah. What do you want, Crystal? It's $800 just for a week. Like what do you think professional training costs? Like, I don't know, man.

[Dan]

What do you

[Linus]

money's got a money

[Luke]

depending on the class size for that many days of training. It's not super outlandish to me for this type of thing.

[Linus]

I don't think so either. And I. Is that it for today?

[Dan]

Yeah. Wow. We got a special guest for the outro.

[Linus]

We have a special guest for the outro.

[Dan]

Sad Michael Reeves.

[Linus]

See you guys again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Dan]

Bye. It.